Photo by Pete Troshak | flickr.com/photos/petryfrompa/sets | twitter.com/shak74

The lineup for the 6th Annual Roots Picnic includes Gary Clark Jr., Lushlife and more [link]

Dave Hartley‘s Top of the Key returns to tell you why the NBA should #LetBonnerShoot [link]

Folk-inspired Philly songwriter Gretchen Lohse records a stunning Key Studio Session [link]

The latest album from Joe D’Amico gets the Unlocked treatment [link]

Portland dance-rock artist ONUINU chats about his upcoming show at Kung Fu Necktie [link]

Get your vote on in The Deli and Tri-State Indie‘s year-in-review polls [link]

Pitchfork gave Bleeding Rainbow‘s new LP a bad review, then premiered it anyway [link]

UK pop singer Jessie Ware played Union Transfer, reminisced about World Cafe [link]

Listen to Simian Mobie Disco recorded live on Making Time RADio [link]

Elder grunge statesmen Soundgarden brought their reunion tour to The Tower Theater [link]

Listen to Yo La Tengo cover The Spinners’ classic “I’ll Be There” from Free at Noon [link]

Ohio singer-songwriter Dolfish is spotlighted in this week’s Folkadelphia session [link]

To be fair, P4K is a big enough machine that it’s naive to expect a universal, definitive opinion from it. The dude assigned to write about the album may not have cared for it, but they can certainly highlight it in other ways. That said, this seems confoundingly polarized. But polarization is what Pitchfork does well. It gets readers and music fans worked up, gets them talking, gets them going to their site. And we’re going to join in the fray and direct you there right now, since I find it almost impossible to believe that Hayden listened to the same album I did when he sat down to review Yeah Right. So make up your own mind, and listen to it here.

(To his credit, Hayden and Bleeding Rainbow Twitter-keeper Sarah Everton had an animated dialogue about the review this morning – and even though I don’t agree with his slant on the album, I appreciate him openly working it out it with her.)

For the non-fazed, Bleeding Rainbow plays Johnny Brendas on Feb. 14 with Ghost Light and Pet Milk. Tickets and information can be found here.

Our contributing writer / photographer Rachel Barrish is studying in Rome this fall, and this past weekend took the opportunity to head north for the Pitchfork Music Festival Paris. From Rachel:

I was in attendance on Friday evening with featured performances from Tallest Man on Earth, The Walkmen, Wild Nothing, Animal Collective, and more. The festival took place at the Grand Hall de Vilette, a large auditorium fit with two stages on either end. The room was filled with people excited and eager to catch their next favorite act.

Check out her photos in the gallery above, and watch a video of Tallest Man on Earth playing “Revelation Blues” below.

Sun Airway

Pitchfork might not have been too enamored with Solar Bears’ debut LP, She Was Coloured In; just yesterday, they gave the album a 6.9, noting that much of it “feels like the soundtrack to a cheesy, choose-your-own-ending sci-fi novel you might pick up at a yard sale.” (Pitchfork insists, however, that isn’t a slight…) Today, at least, the site thinks highly enough of Solar Bear’s remix of Sun Airway‘s “American West” to give it a little press. (Or maybe they’re just such big fans of the original song that they’re willing to look past their recent criticism of those who did the remixing.)

You can listen to Solar Bears’ remix of Sun Airway’s “American West” here.

It is worth mentioning, however—and not because, “OMG WHAT’S WRONG WITH U PITCHFORK PHILLY MUSIC IS AWESOME!!” (which, you know, it is). Honestly, given Pitchfork’s consistent taste, there were a handful of singles released by local bands in 2010 that I thought would be right up their alley. In particular, I’m a little surprised to see Sun Airway’s “Put The Days Away” missing from the list. After all, Pitchfork heaped praise on the song back in August, then posted the video, interviewed Jon Barthmus, and gave the album a decent review. Oh well. “Local music blogger has a gripe with another website’s best-of list, news at 11:00.” Somehow, the world will still turn.

(*The Internet says members of The Walkmen live here Philly, the band still claims New York as home.)

Diplo reacted to the news with this tweet: “Whoa! #2 biggest idiot on twitter! Thanks @pitchforkmedia http://bit.ly/bxudEA .I will @ everyone back 2day in honor! Might take a while tho.” And he wasn’t kidding—we had to click the “more” button four times just to find his response, which came all of three hours ago.

To be fair, Rundgren IS pretty chill

Pitchfork recently posted a new single by San-Diego-based chillwave act TV Girl that caught our attention. (More on why in just a moment.)

Of course, it was only last October that chillwave champion Neon Indian turned more than a few heads with the release of its debut LP, Psychic Chasms. One of those heads (or many of them—depending on whether you view the music website as a singular entity or a mythical, multiple-headed beast along the lines of a Hydra*) belonged to Pitchfork, which placed the track “Deadbeat Summer” at No. 13 in its Top 100 Tracks Of 2009 list. “Deadbeat Summer,” as you might recall, kicks off with an unmistakable sample from Todd Rundgren’s 1974 song, “Izzat Love”—which only added more fuel to the “Are sample-based songs real music or cheap rip-offs from uncreative hacks?” fire.

Frankly, we’re not very interested in getting into that debate right now, mostly because we’re too busy listening to this TV Girl single (“If You Want It”), which—you guessed it—features yet another sample from the Upper-Darby-born Todd Rundgren. This time, it’s his classic 1968 song “Hello It’s Me,” whose opening riff pretty much serves as the basis for the entire TV Girl track. Now, we aren’t going to question why certain songs from the soft-rock-side of Rundgren’s career are so appealing to the current crop of chillwave bands out there—because, honestly, it makes total sense to us. What we do want to know, however, is which Rundgren-inspired song will be the chillwave hit of October 2011? (Assuming the genre is still around a year from now, which we don’t expect it to be.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8kEUP_40Ak&feature=player_embedded#!

*Ed note: But wait, even if a Hydra has multiple heads—each capable of independent thought—doesn’t the hive-minded beast still count as one singular entity? (It must, seeing as how we called it “a beast” and not “beasts”.) More importantly, what would a Hydra think of chillwave bands using Todd Rundgren samples?