The Friday Refrain: A bit of what's new in music - Spring Break Edition

Wooo! Spring break! Well, spring break from the new releases for me this week. I started to feel like A.J. Jacobs in the last few weeks on one of his experiments while doing this whole compiling new releases list/listening to as much as possible. Like an 80's montage, music has become a bit of a blur for the last month for me. My ears needed a vacation, and so that's what's being done.

Until this morning, and bang! I randomly picked some great new music from this week.

But in case you haven't heard: George Michael, Kylie Minogue, Black Lips, John Oates, Enrique Iglesias, Jo Dee Messina, The War On Drugs, Skrillex, and Foster the People all have albums out this week. Also Sisyphus, which if you've been fortunate enough to live in Minnesota and enjoy this lovely winter, you have actually had the chance to buy this album for awhile now at the Walker Art Center. But now the rest of you can buy it! Who is Sisyphus? Sufjan Stevens, Son Lux and Serengeti. So there you go.

And the list. So added some genres this week for the ones that were on Spotify. I mean, I can dig deep and figure out the rest too, but that will be dependent on time and energy in the future. Also, a lot of those assigned genres are after a few samples down the album, so take those with a grain of salt.

But now for this morning's revelations. Ruby the Rabbitfoot, New as Dew, is laid back and fun and nice. In fact, I think I might go buy it right now, or when record stores open because it's too early for record store people as I'm writing this. I bet record store people aren't even eating their oatmeal yet. (Because I'm having oatmeal, so isn't everyone?) It's okay record store people, eat your oatmeal, I can wait.

The Socks, Socks. This is a very annoying thing to google. These are The Socks I'm talking about. In fact, sometimes with these not-so-popular-yet bands, it's impossible. Remember when Boy first came up? That was The. Worst. because you're instinct is to add "band" after the name of the band. Yeah, google "boy band." Now it's easy, or google's just getting to know me so well. Anyway - The Socks = Rock. And they're French? Huh. Well, I do love Phoenix, so play on The Socks!

Ex Hex, "Hot and Cold" - Poppy rock and roll fun. Honestly, I don't think I've steered you wrong yet today, so just give it a go. At least as far as I'm concerned, you'll be satisfied with these three, but who am I to say? That's the whole reason I did this in the first place. Just some info on the new stuff all in one spot without having to click on a million different reviews without all that "I know all" feel to the speaker. I'll try to keep that away. As much as possible while speaking one's mind, that is. What am I doing? Just give it a whirl if you want. You know what you like.

By the way, my release list isn't as diverse this week as usual because of the aforementioned spring break to my ears and also research fingers. So there's a bit of different stuff, but not as much as usual. Well, there you have it The Friday Refrain Spring Break Edition. Hope you have a great weekend and eat some oatmeal (with bananas is the best)!

Friday Refrain is a weekly post regarding what new releases have caught my ear for the week. I try to compile a pretty comprehensive list of releases of the week and see what is available for me to listen to on the web. This is just my non-scientific, highly-subjective, randomly-listened-to list of stuff from the week. Oh, and I don’t always listen to lyrics or look at album art/music videos, so appropriateness is left up to the listener