Singer/guitarist John Davis (Q And Not U, Georgie James), bassist Michael Cotterman (Kid Dynamite, The Loved Ones) and drummer Elmer Sharp (Roofwalkers) handled their WAMU session with consummate ease: The songs “I Don’t Need To Know” and “Low Cool” sprung to life with all the immediacy that might be expected from a band with new material simmering for so many months. (If you’re a longtime WAMU 88.5 listener, you might already be familiar with Title Tracks’ sound — an instrumental version of “Every Little Bit Hurts” was the opening theme for the station’s now-retired Metro Connection show.)

The band celebrates the release of Long Dream on Friday night at Comet Ping Pong in D.C. The album is available for pre-order via Dischord Direct.

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This is the unimaginable backdrop for a breathtaking new video for Adam Bryanbaum Wiltzie’s drifting ambient piece “The Few Of Us Left.” Wiltzie, best known for his work in Stars Of The Lid and A Winged Victory For The Sullen, named the song after the impoverished people who spend their days laboring on the great flats, scooping shovelfuls of salt into mounds to sell. There aren’t many of them left because the Bolivian government is tearing up the flats to mine the infinitely more valuable lithium recently discovered below the salt.

A new documentary, Salero, profiles the remaining salt harvesters and their struggle to hold on. Wiltzie provided the deeply moving score for the film, which includes “The Few Of Us Left.” The video for the song is a compilation of scenes from the film, beautifully edited together by Marina Katz.

“I have always said that composing music is infinitely easier when you have beautiful images to be inspired by,” Wiltzie tells NPR Music in an email. “I was fascinated by this mythical space and its ability to define the identities of the people who live in its vicinity, where this vast salt flat itself would be a central character.”

Salero was directed by Mike Plunkett. “I gravitated towards Adam’s music early in the process of making Salero,” he tells NPR Music. “His score is an elegant blend of haunting, otherworldly tones, and emotional, bittersweet swells. It captures the complex character of the Salar, and it elevates the film’s emotional journey.”

The film Salero is out Dec. 1, while Wiltzie’s complete soundtrack is due out Nov. 11.

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

That seven-song EP will be reissued on vinyl via Priests’ in-house label, and with the announcement comes a video for “Destroy.” The EP’s closing track is about as close to a pop song as Flasher gets, with a bouncy guitar/bass riff, a la The Smiths, and a catchy refrain (“I just wanna be your boy”), but razor-cut with a sarcastic sneer. Dressed in snazzy, blue windbreakers, the band goofs off around D.C. playgrounds, graveyards and parking lots in a video directed by Drew Hagelin.

Flasher is due out Nov. 18 on Sister Polygon.

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

RDGLDGRN is based in the D.C. suburb of Reston, Va. Local music fans know the band well, and have enjoyed watching it win fans across the country and around the world. A few years ago, I heard its first album (Red, Gold, Green) and fell in love with RDGLDGRN’s style. It’s not only because Dave Grohl played drums in most of the songs, while Pharrell Williams cowrote and co-produced “Doing The Most.” I loved the group’s fresh sound, and how its members rapped over the top of real drums. Their catchy hooks and harmonies quickly grabbed my attention.

When planning for RDGLDGRN’s Tiny Desk show, many details were up for consideration: time, date, technical arrangements, and so on. Of biggest concern, though, was how the group would fit into the scaled-down setting of our space. If you go to a RDGLDGRN show, you’ll see a traditional stage set-up with a full complement of instruments. In the venue, you can hear and feel the excitement of a full-blown band and a full drum set; heads bob, hands wave, bodies move, and you don’t find a single person in the audience standing still. It wouldn’t be easy to contain the energy in such a small space.

The colors in the band’s name represent RDGLDGRN’s members: Red (Marcus Parham), Green (Pierre Desrosiers) and Gold (Andrei Busuioceanu), who wear their respective colors all the time, even when offstage or away from the camera. In light of their recent experimentation with Brazilian-style percussion over acoustic versions of their songs, they decided that an all-acoustic set infused with Brazilian vibes would make for the perfect Tiny Desk concert. After performing “Karnival,” the group’s latest single, RDGLDGRN treated us to unplugged versions of a handful of its best-known songs.

“Karnival” is available now (iTunes) (Amazon).

Set List

• “Karnival”
• “Chop U Down”
• “Doing The Most”
• “No Pixar” (Freestyle)

Credits

Producers: Suraya Mohamed, Niki Walker; Audio Engineer: Josh Rogosin; Videographers: Niki Walker, Morgan McCloy; Production Assistant: Anna Marketti; Photo: NPR.

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Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Over the course of a set that includes all 11 of the record’s songs, the group tackles social and political issues with firebrand zeal. Racism, immigration, gun violence, hate symbols and censorship all get their turn in the crosshairs of the band, fronted by Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley. But the record isn’t driven by unfocused anger: It’s a poignant take on what it means to be an American in a time when uncertainty and fear are omnipresent. As Hood says, he hopes to “turn on that light in the basement and see what’s scampering so we can figure out what we’re dealing with.”

Watch the full concert via VuHaus and listen to an interview with Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley at opbmusic.

Drive-By Truckers is on tour now.

Set List

• “Ramon Casiano”
• “Darkened Flags On The Cusp Of Dawn”
• “Surrender Under Protest”
• “Guns Of Umpqua”
• “Filthy And Fried”
• “Sun Don’t Shine”
• “Kinky Hypocrite”
• “Ever South”
• “What It Means”
• “Once They Banned Imagine”
• “Baggage”

Credits

Audio Recording & Mix: Steven Kray, David Barbe; Lighting Design: Matt Rosvold; Scenery: Joseph Paulekas; Editor: Jarratt Taylor; Videographers: Sam Smith, Nate Sjol, Jarratt Taylor, Andrew Barrick; Executive Producer: David Christensen; Senior Vice-President/Content: Morgan Holm.

Copyright 2016 OPB. To see more, visit OPB.

This Tiny Desk Concert was a convergence of art and soul, mixing politics with heart. Common’s choice of songs dealt with incarceration as the new slavery, imagined a time where women rule the world and honored the man he looked up to all his life, his father. For this occasion Common put together a special six-piece band of close friends that includes the great Robert Glasper, with his eloquent and delicate touch, on keyboards and Derrick Hodge, whose music spans from hip-hop to folk and has made a big imprint on the world of jazz, on bass. Common also asked his longtime friend and collaborator Bilal to sing on two songs. The performance includes three brand new songs, along with one classic, “I Used To Love H.E.R.”

Common was born on Chicago’s South Side and grew up in President Obama’s city. His rap career began in the early 1990s, back when he was known as Common Sense, and he’s always taken on big ideas without easy answers in his songs, from abortion to social justice to the legacy of hip-hop itself. 25 years later, morality and responsibility continue to play significant roles in his songs. In 2015, he won an Academy Award alongside the singer John Legend for their song “Glory” from the movie Selma.

Common told us that he’d been invited to the White House many times before, including by Michelle Obama for a poetry reading back in 2011, but he was thrilled by the prospect of performing his music during Barack Obama’s final months as president. One look at this Tiny Desk Concert and you’ll see that thrill on his face and hear it throughout this magnificent performance on this very special day.

Common will release his 11th studio album, Black America Again, in November.

Set List

• “I Used To Love H.E.R.”
• “Letter To The Free”
• “The Day The Women Took Over”
• “Little Chicago Boy”

Credits

Producers: Bob Boilen, Abby O’Neill, Niki Walker; Directors: Mito Habe-Evans, Niki Walker; Audio Engineers: Josh Rogosin, Kevin Wait; Videographers: Niki Walker, Mito Habe-Evans, Nick Michael, Cameron Robert, Nikki Boliaux; Animator: CJ Riculan; Supervising Producer: Jessica Goldstein; Executive Producer: Anya Grundmann; Photo: Becky Harlan/NPR.

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Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

This summer, Noteworthy host Jason King visited Miguel in his Los Angeles home and spoke with him in the studio where he’s working on songs for an upcoming fourth album. Miguel tells King that until recently, his creative process relied on consuming as much as possible — “ideas, films, art, relationships” — in order to get to a place where inspiration could flow freely. “‘Adorn’ happened in a night,” he tells King of his signature hit. “I literally like landed at 10:30 or 11:00, couldn’t sleep and just wrote the song.” Within “two-and-a-half, three hours,” he had written and recorded the whole song. Now, Miguel finds himself at a moment where thinking about social movements like Black Lives Matter is pushing him toward a mode of songwriting driven by a new feeling of responsibility. He also reveals how he began writing songs on his father’s guitar, his love for Bill Withers, why Salvador Dali is on his wallpaper, the best advice Pharrell ever gave him and the importance of L.A. to his artistic vision.

Credits

Producers: Jacob Ganz, Mito Habe-Evans, Jason King, Ben Naddaff-Hafrey; Director/Editor: Mito Habe-Evans; Assistant Director: Cameron Robert; Audio Engineer: Josh Rogosin; Managing Producers: Abby O’Neill, Otis Hart; Executive Producer: Anya Grundmann

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

“The Traveller” appears on Thank Your Lucky Stars, out now via Sub Pop.

For more about how Beach House creates its sound, listen to an interview Bob Boilen did with the band last summer.

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Wolf, however, sees it in a more cathartic way.

“I thought of it as a long exhalation,” he says. “I do yoga and I got the sense that this is a Lion’s Breath: this is the sound, ‘ha,’ stretched out over a long period of time.”

“Haa” is taken from a 2015 live recording, capturing a cathartic section towards the end of a longer work. Wolf aims his attention at the essence of the transition itself. It’s a philosophy espoused by his hero, legendary German avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen.

“His compositional method was understanding a piece as a group of forces, allowing those forces to have particular moments where they dominate, and then have them come back under and play a more supportive role,” says the resident of Arlington, Virginia, who is a regular collaborator with other local experimental acts and a member of post-rock band The Orchid.

“Haa” and On se lève were released in May through D.C. experimental label Verses Records. He paired the track with a video of surreal images like ghostly faces, growing frost and close-ups of blood vessels, appearing and reappearing along to the music.

The video was put together by fellow artist and Verses label head, Dennis Kane, who used the minimalist tautness of the music as visual inspiration.

“There’s this suspension of time and movement and yet, in the layering, there is this ebb and flow,” Kane writes in an email. “I used the women as shades of movement and the various microscopic images as a push and pull element — like the microtonal movements in the piece.”

“We aren’t a band that can say that we’ve been playing since the ’80s,” Nicholson says. “We’re not hardcore punk — we never said that.” But the songwriter and musician — who spent a chunk of his life in the hip-hop trio Opus Akoben — says being from D.C. imparts regional cachet.

“The analogy I always [use] is, say if Kraft cheese needed a new CEO, and a guy from Parma, Italy, got the job,” he says, “people would look at him and say, ‘Oh man, that cat’s from Parma. He knows his cheese.'”

But after the release of Thaylobleu’s debut album, there shouldn’t be any question that the band knows its cheese — rather, its rock ‘n’ roll. Oscars & Jellyfish crackles, with cutting guitars and even sharper social commentary. Musically the record pays homage to ’70s metal, but there’s nothing nostalgic about Nicholson’s lyrics, which tell true, modern-day stories about gentrification and police harassment, among other subjects. (Stream Oscars & Jellyfish right here.)

Earlier this summer, Bandwidth invited Thaylobleu into our studio, hoping to catch a few of the sparks that fly on Oscars & Jellyfish. The band gave us even more than we hoped for. Check out Thaylobleu’s live performances of “Locked” and “Rose in the Briars,” two slashers that flex both the brain and brawn that make D.C. a punk-rock capital, past and present.

Subscribe to Bandwidth’s channel on YouTube, and don’t miss our awesome playlist of every Bandwidth session to date.

Photos by Rhiannon Newman