Click here to watch our full Breaking interview video, featuring Beirut’s Zach Condon playing all the instruments in his apartment and chatting about recording his latest album, The Flying Club Cup.

Who: Multi-instrumentalist Zach Condon, a twenty-one-year-old musical prodigy from New Mexico who dropped out of high school and headed to Europe, where a nutty neighbor exposed him to the old-fashioned Balkan sounds that would influence Gulag Orkestrar, his 2006 album that blew bloggers’ minds.

Sounds Like: Beirut’s folk-rock evokes lazy strolls down European back alleys via a delightfully unpolished blend of Condon’s supple tenor voice, accordion, brass and strings. It’s not hard to detect the influences of Gypsy rock and the orchestral rackets of Elephant 6 bands like Neutral Milk Hotel, either.

Three Things You Should Know:
1. Condon’s big break came when he was working as an ice-cream scooper. “I dropped out of school at sixteen,” he says. “I went back four times, though some of them were as long as one day. I went to the University of New Mexico for about a month when I got a very strange phone call from Ben Goldberg who owns Ba Da Bing! Records, and he said he wanted to release my album. I was going to class that day and I turned around and went home and got the next flight to New York.” (more…)

Click above to check out Christian Hoard’s analysis of Kid Rock’s straight-up Rock N Roll Jesus (which Rock once described to Hoard as the equivalent of going to a bar and getting shit-faced, then discovering a gospel choir there), and tuneful indie-rock act Band of Horses, whose guitar-heavy, beautiful Cease to Begin helped them earn the title of Hot Band in the current Hot Issue.

Read the review for Kid Rock’s Rock N Roll Jesus here and Band of Horses’ Cease to Begin here.

>>Watch every episode of our weekly New Music Tuesdays video podcast by subscribing via iTunes (when prompted, click “Launch application”). Every Tuesday, a new episode will be delivered to your iTunes. [If you don’t have iTunes, download it here.]

Who: Graham Walsh and onetime By Divine Right guitarist Brian Borcherdt, two music geeks from Toronto who started Holy Fuck as a side project aimed at approximating the sound of electronic music with real live instruments.

Sounds Like: A hip Seventies stoner dance party come to life. The band’s two official members plus a rotating rhythm section create ambient but spastic (and strangely groovey) instrumental electro noise rock with an array of what Walsh affectionately terms “toy keyboards and junk and things that made weird sounds.” Onstage, they hover over keyboards, pedals and even what appears to be an old film projector, twisting knobs and pounding at keys while a drummer and bassist help hold together their improvised jams.

Three Things You Should Know:
1. Holy Fuck travel with a lot of gear, and their live show looks like a potentially dangerous electrical closet. “That’s my way of nerding out and getting my gear jollies,” Walsh explains of the band’s messy, wire-covered stage setup. “Initially we were put across as a band that plays toy instruments,” he recalls. “I think our music goes much deeper than us playing toy instruments. I don’t want to seem like the Blue Man Group.” (more…)

Rolling Stone’s Joe Levy says Bruce Springsteen hasn’t made an album that sounds this much like Bruce Springsteen in about twenty or thirty years. With a guitar-centric aesthetic Springsteen hasn’t employed since Darkness on the Edge of Town and echoes of Born to Run, Levy says that along with the latest records from M.I.A. and Arcade Fire, Magic is one of the must-have albums of the year. Click here to watch New Music Tuesdays.

Read David Fricke’s 5-star review of Magic here.

>>Watch every episode of our weekly New Music Tuesdays video podcast by subscribing via iTunes (when prompted, click “Launch application”). Every Tuesday, a new episode will be delivered to your iTunes. [If you don’t have iTunes, download it here.]

Who: Santi White, a Philly-born, Wesleyan-educated producer turned songwriter who used to play in punk band Stiffed, but now specializes in eccentric pop that’s a culture-clash of world music, blips and bleeps, and a healthy dose of reggae.

Sounds Like: Santogold merge White’s versatile voice (which recalls M.I.A. one minute and Karen O the next) with quirky, off-kilter beats. The result is a kaleidoscope of organic and synthetic sounds held together by White’s attitude-filled flow.

Three Things You Should Know:
1. White moved to New York in early 2005 after she lost her father and decided she needed to focus on her music. She started out as a songwriter, and has written with Lily Allen and Marc Ronson as well as for Ashlee Simpson. (Her current roster of collaborators includes hip beatmasters Spank Rock and Switch.)

2. Santogold was hand-picked by Björk to open for the Icelandic pop star when she played Madison Square Garden this week. The show took place on Santi’s birthday, and the crowd sang to her. “After each show they do a little dance party backstage because Björk likes to get her adrenaline out of her muscles,” White explains. “Each night a different person DJs off their iPod, then we had these dance battles in a circle. It’s like a pajama party dance party.” (more…)

Who: A microbiologist turned rocker from Sweden who was planning a career in academics or pharmaceuticals until he released his first album, 2005’s Veneer, and found fame with a cover of the Knife’s “Heartbeats” on a TV commercial and The O.C.

Sounds Like: José Gonzaléz’s music instantly recalls other mellow introspective folk-rockers like Elliott Smith and Nick Drake, but the singer’s significant South American influence sets him apart.

Three Things You Should Know:
1. Gonzaléz, who considers himself an atheist, titled his new album In Our Nature in reference to the debate over whether human behavior is biologically dictated. Science, philosophy and religion are major lyrical themes for him. “I don’t want to be too harsh, but there’s very little evidence for ‘intelligent design’ or any sort of creator,” he explains.

2. Before high school, Gonzaléz spent a summer taking classical guitar lessons while also playing in a punk band. “I wore dreadlocks and rode a skateboard,” the singer remembers. “The rest of the guys in the band were really bad at school — I was the one who did the homework.” (more…)

Click here to watch the New Music Tuesdays reviews of Eddie Vedder and James Blunt’s new albums.

Rolling Stone’s Christian Hoard presents the “sensitive souls edition” of New Music Tuesdays, examining Eddie Vedder’s soundtrack to the film Into the Wild and James Blunt’s sophomore album All the Lost Souls. The verdict: Vedder’s LP is an apt soundtrack for the subject matter at hand (and a winner for Pearl Jam fans), and Blunt’s new album is a slightly sappy improvement over his debut, which featured the ubiquitous “You’re Beautiful”; though Hoard believes it only serves to make Coldplay sound exciting. Watch the video for his full reviews.

To read our full review of Eddie Vedder’s album, click here, and for James Blunt, click here.

>>Watch every episode of our weekly New Music Tuesdays video podcast by subscribing via iTunes (when prompted, click “Launch application”). Every Tuesday, a new episode will be delivered to your iTunes. [If you don’t have iTunes, download it here.]

Click here to watch Grand National’s video for “By the Time I Get Home There Won’t Be Much of a Place for Me.”

Who: Lawrence “La” Rudd and Rupert Lyddon, a pair of witty English dance-music enthusiasts with no particular fondness for horses — they had planned to name themselves after the pony that won a major horse race, wound up taking the name of the competition itself to save time, and have been plagued with horse-related questions from interviewers ever since.

Sounds Like: Dancey electro-rock that bounces along to soulful, Eighties-tinged grooves and clubby synths but never loses the “rock” side of the equation. The group’s second album A Drink and a Quick Decision, like their debut Kicking the National Habit pulls from influences that range from Depeche Mode to Hall and Oates.

Three Things You Should Know:
1. When Lyddon used to deliver sausages for a living, he scored studio time in the band’s early days by making a deal with Primal Scream — he’d hand over as many sausages as they desired, and the band let him borrow the keys to the studio. (more…)

Click here to watch New Music Tuesdays: 50 Cent Vs. Kanye West.

The showdown has arrived: Today 50 Cent’s Curtis goes head-to-head with Kanye West’s Graduation at record stores. So who’s got the edge? Rolling Stone’s Joe Levy says both albums are incredibly ambitious in different ways. He calls the gritty, cinematic Curtis Boyz N the Hood meets Wall Street, and notes that West’s unique album is geared for the YouTube/MySpace age, where everyone’s a star and can therefore theoretically relate to Kanye’s rhymes about the struggles of celebrity. Watch the video for more of Levy’s review, plus clips from both albums.

To read our full review of Kanye West’s album, click here, and for 50 Cent, click here.

Who: A lively mixed-race, mixed-sex crew of English kids who make a peppy, exuberant blend of rock, hip-hop, funk and TV-theme music that belies their band moniker (they’re named after the workers who clear wreckage in the wake of plane crashes).

Sounds Like: Band mastermind Ian Parton assembles mash-up-mad rock grooves stocked with strange found-sound samples, and the rest of the group, including MC Ninja, raps and shouts on top of the collage-like concoctions.

Three Things You Should Know:
1. Ninja joined the band after answering Parton’s ad for a female rapper. The MC (who has real martial-arts skills) auditioned for a soap opera and a science show called Tomorrow’s World just prior to landing her Go! Team gig. (more…)