By: Michael Madavi and Jillian Putnam-Smith

To start off 2009 we are celebrating IODAcast’s 50th episode!  We’ve put together a retrospective- highlighting a number of our favorite artists from the hundreds of amazing independent musicians we’ve dug up and featured over the past few years.

IODAcast 50 features: The Black Angels, Tinariwen, Frightened Rabbit, Broken Social Scene, Burial, Pigeon John, School of Seven Bells and Beirut.

Listen to the entire podcast over at IODAcast.com or look us up on iTunes!

Read about the featured artists and download the featured tracks below:

The Black Angels
“Bloodhounds On My Trail” (mp3)
from “Passover”

(Blue Scholars / Light in the Attic)

More On This Album

The Black Angels are a psychedelic rock band from Austin, Texas, formed in May 2004. Their name derives from the Velvet Underground song “The Black Angel’s Death Song”. Having played at Lollapalooza, SXSW, and All Tomorrow’s Parties, the group has gained much critical praise for their dark, psych-rock. Resurrecting the dark, drone style of the 60’s and blending it with southern rock, The Angels have an authentic sound that’s rarely heard today.
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Tinariwen
“Cler Achel” (mp3)
from “Aman Iman: Water Is Life”

(World Village)
More On This Album

Securing praise from Thom Yorke, Santana, Robert Plant, Bono, Coldplay, Tinariwen are guitar-poets from the southern Sahara desert. They are icons of freedom and resistance among their own people, the nomadic Touareg of the Sahara. The group was founded at the end of the 1970s, during a period of great suffering in the desert, due to the catastrophic droughts of the early 1970s that decimated the animal herds and almost destroyed the Touareg’s ancient nomadic way of life. Tinariwen began to write songs describing the pain of exile, the longing for lost homes and families, the struggle for political and cultural freedom, and the rigors of everyday life in the desert. Transposing the traditional melodies of the Touareg on the electric guitar then mixing them with blues, rock, pop, Berber and Arabic influences, Tinariwen created a modern desert rock sound. In the early 1980s, the were  lured into rebel training camps in Libya by Colonel Gadaffi, becoming the official mouthpiece of the Touareg rebellion in northern Mali and Niger, which all the founding members of the group took part in. Now with three successful albums released, including the latest Aman Iman, numerous tours of Europe, USA and the Far East, appearances at the most prestigious festivals and a BBC Award for World Music, Tinariwen have emerged as a prolific and truly special musical group.
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Frightened Rabbit
“The Modern Leper” (mp3)
from “The Midnight Organ Fight”

(Fat Cat Records)
More On This Album

Haunted indie-folk with moments of real urgency and a Pixie-esque dynamic range that can take you from hushed to majestic and back again in seconds flat. And they’re from Scotland, so the accent is a nice touch. Rabbit took the blogosphere by storm on the strength of 2006’s Sing the Greys then kicked it up a notch in April with The Midnight Organ Fight, hailed by Nicholas Harmer of Death Cab for Cutie as his favorite album of 2008.

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Broken Social Scene
“Hotel” (mp3)
from “Broken Social Scene”

(Arts & Crafts)
More On This Album

Broken Social Scene are an award winning Canadian indie rock band, a music collective currently including nineteen members, formed in 1999 by Kevin Drew and Brendan Canning. All of its members currently play in various other groups and solo projects, mainly based around the city of Toronto and the Arts and Crafts Label. It is characterized by a very large number of sounds, grand orchestrations featuring guitars, horns, woodwinds, and violins, unusual song structures, and an experimental and sometimes chaotic production style from David Newfeld. Their 2003 and 2006 albums released under the BSS name have both won the Juno Award for Best Alternative Album. The group is comprised of members from Stars, Feist, Metric, Valley of the Giants, The Weakerthans, Apostle of Hustle, and and Do Make Say Think.

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Burial
“Ghost Hardware” (mp3)
from “Untrue”

(Hyperdub)
More On This Album

The mysterious and talented Burial is an English dubstep producer. His eponymous debut album was released in 2006 to critical acclaim. The Wire magazine named it their album of the year, along with achieving fifth place in the Mixmag 2006 Album of the Year list, and eighteenth in the best of the year list of The Observer music monthly supplement. His follow-up, Untrue, was released in 2007 and was a nominee for a coveted 2008 Mercury Music Prize. Keeping his identity out of the spotlight (it was speculated he might be Aphex Twin or Fat Boy Slim), little is known about Burial except (in his own words) he is, “a low key person [who] just wants to make some tunes, nothing else.”
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Pigeon John
“Freaks! Freaks!” (mp3)
from “Pigeon John & The Summertime Pool Party”

(Quannum Projects)
More On This Album

Pigeon John is a Los Angeles area rapper who has recorded four studio albums as a solo artist, as well as several others as a member of the groups like L.A. Symphony and Brainwash Projects. He has collaborated with many of Hip-Hop’s greatest names including Blackalicious and Lyrics Born, and has been featured in publications including Entertainment Weekly, VIBE, SPIN Magazine and LA Weekly. In 2006, after signing to Quannum, Pigeon John released his fourth solo album, And the Summertime Pool Party to much critical praise.
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School of Seven Bells
“Half Asleep” (mp3)
from “Alpinisms”

(Ghostly International)
More On This Album

Composed of Benjamin Curtis (The Secret Machines) with sisters Alejandra and Claudia Deheza (On-Air Library!), The School of Seven Bells was formed in 2004 while the members were on tour together. The group takes its name from a mythical South American pickpocket academy that may or may not have existed in the ’80s. School of Seven Bells’ music is full of tensions-Curtis’ gentle guitars wrap around jagged beats; silky vocals hide behind grumpy, alien synthesizers-but the resulting songs are effortlessly cohesive, and insidiously catchy.
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Beirut
“Postcards From Italy” (mp3)
from “Gulag Orkestar”

(Ba Da Bing!)
More On This Album

Beirut was initially the solo musical project of 22-year-old Santa Fe native Zach Condon, which later evolved into a band led by Condon. Their 2006 debut album, Gulag Orkestar, combines elements of Eastern European music and folk with Western pop. Beirut’s second album, The Flying Club Cup, was recorded largely at a makeshift studio in Albuquerque and completed at Arcade Fire’s studio in Quebec. The music on the album has a French influence due to Condon’s interest in French chanson during its recording. Condon plays the trumpet and the ukulele as his main instruments, having been unable to play guitar because of a wrist injury that prevented his hand from reaching fully around the neck of a guitar. In 2008, Condon canceled Beirut’s planned European Tour and took time off to re-evaluate his music and the direction of the band, much to many fan’s bewilderment and sorrow. Beirut has triumphantly returned in 2009 with the release of a double-ep March of the Zapotec, based on Condon’s recent trip to Oaxaca, Mexico, and Holland, under the name of his former musical project, Realpeople.