“Calm Down” (streaming below) is the opener from Ruby Red—the third album from Chapel Hill and Raleigh's reliably hook-happy and heartbroken The Love Language, due via Merge Records on July 23. That’s the cover art at the top of the post.

“Calm Down” is also the first of a handful of songs on Ruby Red that finds the normally grandiose pop outfit digging into deep garage grooves, taking cues from rising Bay Area rock acts such as Thee Oh Sees and Ty Segall. Stuart McLamb—the outfit’s singer, songwriter and only reliable member—seems to have been paying attention to his competition, balacing his blue-eyed pop melodies and profoundly emotional songs with hints of rock ‘n’ roll grit and tight psychedelics.

The song announces itself a with quick and meaty combo of drums and bass before building up a gauzy, jangling wall built from multiple guitar tracks. The tender touch is familiar. The surging rhythm is new, matching McLamb with a nervy and somewhat concussive backbeat that equals his own irrepressible verve. Fittingly, the song is about a relationship in which the singer never feels at ease. “You won’t let me calm down!” he shouts in the chorus, the musical momentum driving him just as hard as the lover in question. After the final chorus, the band locks into a wild, two-minute outro. Distortion solidifies into a torrent of noise as the groove escalates with Kraut-approximating intensity.

This isn’t The Love Language we’ve come to expect. It’s something bolder. Check it out:

Since debuting in 2005 with a split 7-inch featuring California’s Godstomper and Maryland’s Magrudergrind, To Live A Lie Records—the one-man operation of Raleigh’s Will Butler—has steadily issued solid slabs of grindcore, powerviolence and hardcore from bands across the globe. Of the 91 titles in its catalog, though, only a few are homegrown. Of particular note: Thieves’ 2010 EP Positive Vibrations, Torch Runner’s 2012 album Committed To The Ground and Brian Walsby’s latest Manchild book.

This summer, To Live A Lie’s local-interest catalog will grow with the release of full-length debuts from two young Raleigh bands, each spun from the (still technically unofficial) demise of Stripmines.

The first of these, Last Words’ self-titled LP, is expected this summer. The quartet features Stripmines guitarist Jeff Young, bassist Dave Yarwood (Antibubbles, No Love), drummer Connor Donegan (a recent addition to Double Negative’s lineup, at least until the end of this month) and vocalist Marina Madden. Their 20-minute album lunges through 10 songs, shifting regularly between frenzied sprints and slowed-down stomps true to their Boston hardcore influences. Where the album stands out, though, is in Madden’s vicious vocals, which use her throaty, higher-register timbre to tilt the songs toward black metal maleficence.

Abuse., whose full-length will follow the A New Low EP released by Greensboro’s Hygiene Records, skews closer to powerviolence, yielding few songs that pass the one-minute mark. Stripmines bassist Alex Taylor takes vocal duties, barking over a belligerent blast that’s driven, again, by Donegan on drums.

“None of it has been recorded yet, but we have about 20 songs that are finished being written,” Donegan admits. “I don't actually even know how many songs we have now because everyone has songs that they've written that none of us have learned yet because of how busy we all are with other bands, work, and school.”

To Live A Lie expects a release date in August.

"It's been a couple years since I gave a fuck/ It's been a couple more since I ran out of luck."

That's the opening couplet from "Omnicide" — the lead-off to Time Stamp, Annuals' first full-length in five years — and it couldn't be more blunt about the struggles that have forestalled its release. Since ascending to major label success — 2008's Such Fun came out on the Columbia Records subsidiary Canvasback — the group has parted ways with the imprint and endured the financial fallout from a pretty devastating break-in and theft at their practice space, all while weathering the advancement of time and lives that too often upends bands, even ones who haven't been hit with such bad fortune.

Last Tuesday, with little fanfare, Annuals added Time Stamp as an $8 download on their Bandcamp page. It's the band's first large platter since Such Fun and their first release of any kind since the five-song EP Sweet Sister arrived in 2010. Much of the record sat almost finished for about 18 months while the group figured out what they wanted to do with it; the project's completion threatened to deplete all of Annuals' funds.

Revealing a new level of maturity, these songs are rawer in their emotional immediacy and tidier in their sonic diversity, organizing stray elements of electronica, folk and pop into potent and punchy offerings. "Omnicide" builds from breezy acoustic strums, ratcheting up with kinetic drum loops and robust distortion before exploding into a dense electro-pop groove in the vein of All Tiny Creatures. "Orbweaver" complicates outsized country balladry with ragtime piano fills that are continually twisted by effects and odd electronic flourishes. Time Stamp still overflows with ideas and moods in the way of Annuals' previous records, but — on first blush — it wields them with greater control.

"Whether it's a swan song, a comeback, or something else... Even we aren't sure," Annuals wrote in their description of the album. "There have been good, bad, hard, and harder times since our departure from Canvasback and Columbia Records in 2010. It seems we've all individually landed on our feet but for better or worse in different, separate places."

Here's hoping for the comeback.

• Mike Vorassi
• Looking to the past: Future Islands

Today, three Art Lord members - Samuel Herring, William Cashion, and Gerrit Welmers - comprise prominent Baltimore synth-pop outfit Future Islands. Yet the preceding band formed in Greenville, while they were art students at ECU, in the same grungy house-show scene that spawned Valient Thorr, The Kickass and, eventually, Lonnie Walker. The reunion show is even the tenth anniversary of a show at Soccer Moms' House—one of a handful of semi-legal show spaces that town's surprisingly fertile underground relied on in the early- and mid-’00s.

"(We're in the Same) Bubble Baby," originally from 2003 LP Searching for a Complement, finds its nightmarish, drum machine-driven New Wave ably remastered by Talk Normal's Sarah Register, who did the same for the rest of the retrospective. The new version maintains the original's hypnotic minimalism, which matches perfectly with a tale of hopeless, decrepit barhounds "trying to make it out alive." Register has tastefully bolstered the existing track, lending it higher fidelity and more distinct thump and snap without overdoing it. This bodes well for the rest of the collection.

Right on the heels of a Chorus Project Cat's Cradle benefit concert this past Monday, sales of this track will benefit KidZNotes, a Durham nonprofit which provides children's classical music instruction and organizes youth orchestras in low-performance school districts.

The track, again, is here.

Santa has been making his list and checking it twice since 1939. The chestnuts have been roasting since 1944. And Rudolph with his nose-so-bright has had us blazed at Christmas since 1949. Christmas, it seems, is a holiday as much about nostalgic feelings as new memories; The Rosebuds' latest release, Christmas Tree Island, takes that spirit to heart.

At 13 tracks, the record mines timeworn Christmas themes with new energy. The band's signature pop swells enthrall from the first jingle bells on "I Hear (Click, Click, Click)" to the beautiful strings on closer "Journey to Christmas Island."

"Christmas music is more than just changing the lyrics to a non-holiday themed song," according to the merry manifesto on the record's Bandcamp page. "It's about creating a world of its own specifically for the Holiday and capturing those feelings for a moment."

Those high intentions lead to songs of big city celebrations ("Xmas in New York"), unsung heroes ("Christmas Dan") and the simple joys of Christmas morning ("Blackout Choir"). Altogether, it's a worthy send-up of holiday tunes that trade schmaltz for pop delight.

Preview and download Christmas Tree Island here. While you're at it, check out the band's recent and great 20th anniversary tribute to Sade's Love Deluxe here.

Last week marked the 20-year anniversary of Sade’s classic, Love Deluxe. In tribute to the original, Raleigh-based band The Rosebuds (now living in New York) have released their own version of Sade’s Love Deluxe, recorded while frontman Ivan Howard spent some time on the North Carolina coast polishing up demos for The Rosebuds.

Sade’s discography has always strongly resonated with the duo, explains co-founder Kelly Crisp in an essay, influencing the breadth of the band’s work over the years. The album was recorded independent of Crisp, but it still reflects all of the swooning moods and romantic battles that the two have expressed during their career as a couple and, following their breakup, just as bandmates.

In a recent three-part article for the magazine Wax Poetics, journalist Nelson George examines the arc of Sade’s discography, starting with 1984’s Diamond Life and ending with this year’s CD release of live material, Bring Me Home Live 2011. He points out that Sade’s 1992 classic Love Deluxe LP was “mixed almost like a dub album with the silences between the notes as powerful a presence on the record as the instruments themselves.” Later, George calls Love Deluxe “the apex of this balance between rhythm and space, melody and arrangement.”

The friends who helped Howard achieve The Rosebuds’ take on this balance—Rob Lackey on drums, Matt Douglas on saxophone and Jon Yu on keys—don’t mutate much of the original’s jazz and dub undertones. Instead, they fill in those shadows between notes by fogging songs like “Bullet Proof Love” with chords and a sax that reinterprets the blues and erogenous vibes of Love Deluxe .

While missing the percussive droplets that lead the original through themes of joblessness, despair and hatred, The Rosebuds’ take of “Feel No Pain” still captures the song’s social consciousness. The question in the lyrics “Do you ever see a man break down?” is left dangling in both versions, but with Ivan Howard singing it, we hear the testimony of a stand-in man whose past losses in love and life re-teach him how to walk with his head held high. Even if Howard can’t match Sade’s goddess-like incantations, he casts his own spell over this material; he presides with the universal voice of the blues.

Artists from jazz legend Herbie Hancock to neo-soul singer Pru have covered Sade songs in the past; this year saw the release of jazz/ hip-hop virtuoso Robert Glasper’s Black Radio, which featured Lalah Hathaway’s cover of Sade’s “Cherish the Day.” Head-to-head with The Rosebuds’ version of Love Deluxe’s “Cherish the Day,” the two couldn’t be any more different: Howard is almost daring his lover to abandon him, whereas Sade pleads with and preps her lover as she’s gliding towards him. Hathaway and Glasper’s version, on the other hand, leans more toward reunion-worship and doesn’t out-beg The Rosebuds’ call-to-rescue.

It took Ari Picker—the composer and songwriter who leads Chapel Hill's orchestrally inclined Lost in the Trees—four years to follow up 2008's All Alone in an Empty House. Though the record was reissued and expanded in 2010, Picker didn't debut a full collection of new songs until this year's haunting and fractured A Church That Fits Our Needs, an extension of All Alone's narrative and a tribute to his late mother.

It seems that listeners won't have to wait another four years for the Tress' next effort. The band recently played a session at the Los Angeles-based radio station KCRW and premiered a new song during the performance. The tune, called "Glass Harp," represents a tasteful evolution of the group's sound. The keyboard added to approximate A Church's complex arrangements is utilized in a pensive, reverb-rich piano part. Picker switches to an electric guitar, too, while effects create gauzy tangles from violin solos. The result is a gracefully distorted wash of melody and rhythm that pushes the Trees into new territory without forsaking their identity.

Lost in the Trees' entire KCRW session is available here.

Bellied Up At Sick Town by Whatever Brains from LoganSayles on Vimeo.

Raleigh's Whatever Brains are nothing if not prolific. After releasing self-titled LPs in 2011 and 2012 that landed less than a year apart, the darkly sarcastic post-punks return with a video for "Bellied Up at Sick Town," a new demo that will likely be included on the outfit's in-progress third album. The video captures the Brains in their recent live line-up, which features the added percussion of an extra floor tom and two guys on synthesizer. The result is a complex and demanding track where rhythms ricochet off one another in disorienting fashion. One of the band's trademark bass lines mixes skuzz and muscle as synths steeped in '80s horror add a sense of stylish creepiness. The video mimics the sound as screens behind the band display videos of them playing, images doubling and refracting with psychedelic abandon. If the video leaves you hungry for more Brains, they have also posted another demo — entitled "Companymen" — to their website.