Moxie Java nearly tripled this year’s donation to The Idaho Foodbank through sales of IdaHo Ho Ho with Moxie Java. Though this is only the second year Moxie Java has produced the holiday CD, sales generated $18,261.48, enough to provide approximately 54,000 meals for those in need throughout the state.

“This is such a wonderful project, so much in the spirit of the holidays,” said Karen Vauk, President and CEO of The Idaho Foodbank. “We are very grateful to Moxie Java and everyone who once again gave so generously of their time and talent to make this a reality. We very much look forward to the 2012 holiday CD.”

Though it was only available for the holidays, over 1,900 CDs were sold at Moxie Java locations and the Record Exchange. IdaHo Ho Ho with Moxie Java charted No. 1 and 2 on the Record Exchange weekly best seller list in December and came in No. 5 on its top 50 sellers list for 2011.

“The Record Exchange was proud to carry this special holiday CD, and its sales performance here at the store was indicative of the quality of the music and the generosity of our community,” said Chad Dryden, Marketing and Promotions Director for the Record Exchange. “It was great to see so many enthused customers come in looking specifically for the CD and show their support for our local music scene and The Idaho Foodbank.”

“Producing a record with local original and traditional Christmas music for such a great cause has become one of the highlights of my year,” said Steve Fulton, owner of Audio Lab, where the CD was produced. “I have enough music earmarked for at least a couple more years already. There are so many incredible artists who want to contribute that the quality of this CD is just going to continue to be of high caliber. I look forward to the next one.”

If you still haven’t picked up the 2011 album, limited quantities are available at The Record Exchange throughout the year. The 2010 and 2011 compilations will also be available next November along with the third album, which is already in the works.

“Between the amazing Idaho artists donating their time, Audio Lab and The Record Exchange as a partner we seem to have found a trifecta of talent that we are so proud to stand behind,” said Moxie Java’s Carrie Hoff. “We couldn’t be more thankful to everyone who helped make this project a success and look forward to what we can do for The Idaho Foodbank in December.”

If local musicians are interested in participating in the 2012 IdaHo Ho Ho with Moxie Java compilation, they may contact Andy Petersen at andy[at]mitchellpalmer.com.

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The Other F Word is a raucous, eye-opening, sad and unexpectedly wise look at veteran punk rockers as they adapt to the challenges of fatherhood. To be sure, watching foul-mouthed, colorfully inked musicians attempt to fit themselves into Ward Cleaver’s smoking jacket provides for some consistently hilarious situational comedy, but the film’s deeper delving into a whole generation of artists clumsily making amends for their own absentee parents could strike a resonant note with anyone (punk or not) who’s stumbled headfirst into family life. — Andrew Barker, Variety

OTHER NEW DVD/BLU-RAY RELEASES

Radiohead The King of Limbs: Live from the Basement DVD and Blu-ray
PJ Harvey Let England Shake: 12 Short Films DVD
Styx The Grand Illusion/Pieces of Eight DVD
Queen Days of Our Lives DVD and Blu-ray
Drive DVD and Blu-ray
Das Boot Blu-ray
To Kill a Mockingbird DVD and Blu-ray
The Big Year Blu-ray
The English Patient Blu-ray

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Sunn 0)))‘s Greg Anderson, Stephen O’Malley, and longtime partner G. Stuart Dahlquist — respectively credited as the Duke, MK Ultra Blizzard, and G:Subharmonia — trudge through riffs in synchronous, suspended time, making up for a lack of surprises with a wealth of tone. They’d recorded their only previous release, The GrimmRobe Demos, in a small Los Angeles studio, but ØØ VOID was captured in Hollywood’s Grandmaster, a high-fidelity location where Stevie Wonder, Neil Young, No Doubt, and Tool have all made records. Sunn O))) have always had a reputation for exacting technical standards and for pushing the limits of their force and fidelity (“Maximum Volume Yields Maximum Results,” their credo goes), and ØØ VOID offers the first perfect sign of that. These recordings are monolithic, dense, and relentless, even if the compositions themselves sound much as you might expect.

There are some allusions to extracurricular influences here, like the ghastly vocals of Scream’s Pete Stahl, which circle like ghosts inside the electric tide of “NN O)))”.  A delicate pluck opens “Rabbit’s Revenge”, and long, thin tones sometimes rise to gird a riff’s lumbering end. Speaking of subtle additions, the 14-minute crawl is a cover of an early version of the Melvins song that some have suggested (and others have contested) became 1992′s “Hung Bunny”; listen closely past the five-minute mark, and you’ll notice that Sunn O))) seem to have momentarily drafted a drummer and a screamer. It’s actually a bootleg of Melvins playing the song, the sample spliced beneath the drone as both acknowledgment and texture. Years later, Sunn O)))’s evolution would come to depend on such outside sounds. — Pitchfork

OTHER NEW VINYL RELEASES:

Leonard Cohen Old Ideas
Hospitality Hospitality
Various Artists Matador Intended Play 2012 (only $1.99!)
Hit the Lights Invicta
Black Cobra Invernal
Ladytron Witching Hour
The Lonely Forest Arrows
Tom Morello: The Nightwatchman Fabled City
Tom Morello: The Nightwatchman One Man Revolution
Tom Morello: The Nightwatchman Union Town
Thee Headcoats The Kids Are All Square – This is Hip!
Thee Headcoats Knights of the Baskervilles

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Amber Papini’s world is full of doors, locks, and keys. Half the tracks on her band Hospitality‘s self-titled debut LP make mention of these things, either their presence or, more significantly, their absence. Take “Liberal Arts”, an appropriately languid tribute to mapless post-graduate ennui: “So you found the lock/ But not the key that college brings/ And all the trouble of your B.A. in English literature/ Instead of law, or something more practical,” Papini wryly surmises over a tamped-down electric riff and shuffly drums, showing her hand as the most promising recent graduate of the Tracyanne Campbell school of cardigan rock. (In non-metaphorical reality, Papini studied at Yale.)

This album is about the comings and goings that can consume a certain kind of twentysomething’s life, about fuguing and settling and sometimes not being able to tell one from the other. This album is also very fun, perhaps because, as Papini has wandered into her 30s, she seems to have realized that none of that really goes away, it just gets easier, or at least starts to seem bearably silly. In these songs, quietly groovy drumbeats turn fully danceable in the flick of an instant, shimmering Afropoppy guitar rains down like confetti, whole brass sections seem to barge in and sneak away and climb back in through some window.

Papini’s voice is funny — kind of a knowingly prim brogue, one that would seem painfully affected if it wasn’t so clear she’s in on the vamping. As the press-packet story goes, she taught herself to sing growing up in Kansas City, Mo., via repeated listenings of the Psychedelic Furs’ Talk Talk Talk. But that doesn’t quite explain the darling strangeness of her voice, its sweet, rubbery petulance. It sounds more like she’s channeling Hayley Mills duetting with Hayley Mills on “Let’s Get Together”, that song from The Parent Trap, the 1961 Disney movie in which Mills stars as teenage twins, separated at birth but reunited at summer camp, trying to trick their divorced parents into getting remarried. This preposterous plan at one point involves a musical number, the British Mills singing on one side as a West Coast tomboy, struggling to make sense of all the r’s, and on the other as a clipped Boston debutante with a Mid-Atlantic lilt. Papini’s voice falls somewhere in the funny middle space between the sisters’ harmonies, whatever Midwestern drawl she might be shoving aside yearning from the wings, hand in hand with Mills’ Londoner tendencies; she even punctuates a few of her own lines with a prodding “yeah, yeah!” that almost precisely echos the entirely unsubtle “Let’s Get Together” refrain. All Mills got out of the song was a No. 8 Billboard hit and a politely-ignored novelty LP. By all accounts, Hospitality should fare a bit better. — Pitchfork

OTHER NEW CD RECOMMENDATIONS:

Metallica Beyond Magnetic
Lana Del Rey Born to Die
Mike Doughty The Question Jar Show
Ruthie Foster Let It Burn
Authority Zero Less Rhythm More Booze
Bleeding Through Great Fire
The Internet Purple Naked Ladies
Asteroids Galaxy Tour Out of Frequency
Del McCoury Band Old Memories: The Songs of Bill Monroe
Gotye Making Mirrors
Soja Strength to Survive
Alcest Les Voyages de L’ame