sxsw 2008

San Francisco may sound an unlikely place for a young guitarist, singer and songwriter from Llanelli (South Wales) to start his musical career but that’s where the story begins for Christopher Rees. In 1994, after playing guitar and developing his song writing skills during his time at Cardiff University he packed his bags and like his hero John Cale bought a plane ticket to New York. A period of self discovery followed with a Zen-like summer spent teaching Kayaking and Canoeing on the lakes and rivers of Vermont before a Kerouac-inspired journey across America.

The phrase “Long Live All of Us” is the title of Glossary’s seventh full-length album, but it’s also meant as an all-inclusive homage to humanity. Frontman Joey Kneiser says, in light of all the bad things happening in the world, the band just wanted to make a positive record. Long Live All of Us allowed the band from Murfreesboro, Tennessee, to take their influences farther than ever before, adding piano, haunting pedal steel, R&B-influenced horns and more to their own style of romanticized rock & roll.

The Russian Futurists are a Canadian indie pop band based in Toronto. Their music can be described as lo-fi, indie-electronica fused with a twee-pop temperament. Although they initially had only one member, Matthew Adam Hart (born 1978), the band was later enlarged for live performances. Brief, exhilarating songs about love