1. Birds Are Indie hail from Coimbra, and their first EP, Love Birds, Hate Pollen, is available for free download here [you want the download link marked "todos os temas", aren't you guys glad I can speak this crazy Portuguese language? ;)]. This is one of the coolest things I have heard in for-freaking-ever: just the right amount of prettiness and weirdness combined.
2. Mouse & The Billionaire are Matt and Lisa from the Brooklyn, and their EP The Four Trees can be downloaded here. If I'd have to label this record, I'd say it's "experimental adorableness". Yes.
3. Jeremy Messersmith is a singer-songwriter dude that's best explained -- I kid you not -- by The Onion, and I quote, "Imagine Elliott Smith driving in a convertible, the wind flying through his hair, singing about sadness and somehow creating joy enough to forget his troubles for a while." And hilariously accurate too. You can find his latest album, The Reluctant Graveyard, either at bolachas.org with a free download link, or you can go to his bandcamp page, have a listen and maybe spend a couple bucks to download it all legally and shit. Also, one day someone will explain to me why half of my music comes from Minnesota. [The other half, of course, comes from Sweden. IDEK.]
4. Local Natives are five Californian dudes that Pitchfork said sounded like "a West Coast Grizzly Bear", to which I say: pfffffft. Gorilla Manor is their first album and it's BY FAR my very favorite record that was released in 2009. I swear that for me no one came even close to the perfect ODDNESS that makes up this CD. The main reason I love it so much is the same reason I love M. Craft's Silver & Fire, actually -- each song is kind of completely disconnected from the others, different styles and different instruments and different themes, but somehow together they make an extremely tight album. I mean, Camera Talk is kind of a softporn reggae, and Cards & Quarters sound as if Boyz II Men and Fleet Foxes had an offspring, and there's a Talking Heads cover [Warning Sign], so, I repeat: PERFECT ODDNESS. Anyway. This one's on my server, so right-click-save-as if you please, and if you have a listen, tell me what you think, K? K. [Oh, and their Daytrotter Session is pretty fucking ninja too.]