Members: (L-R) Ben Knox Miller, Jeff Prystowsky and Jocie Adams (not pictured, Cyrus Scofield)
Album: Oh My God, Charlie Darwin 
For Fans Of: Nick Drake, Joe Henry, Gary Jules

Tinker and Evers. Reese and Robinson. Trammel and 
Whitaker. All of baseball’s great double-play duos moved in a way that was almost musical. Ben Knox Miller and Jeff Prystowsky extended those harmonies from the baseball diamond to an actual band.

Who are Vito and Monique Aiuto? Simple church folk suddenly clamoring for hipster cred? A Sufjan Stevens project masquerading under a new moniker? Are they simple-minded reactionaries? Or simply a Presbyterian minister and his wife, taking a break from tending their flock to play some heartfelt religious tunes?

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Manhattan might have St. Patrick’s, Trinity and St. John the Divine, yet it’s Brooklyn that’s called “the borough of churches.” Climbing up from the G Train at Greenpoint Avenue, you’d have to be blind to miss the block’s focal point—St. Anthony of Padua, a Roman Catholic church that visually anchors this largely Polish but rapidly changing neighborhood with its red brick, white limestone, gothic arches and 240-foot spire.

David Lynch once called film “a magical medium that allows you to dream in the dark.” Walking the carpeted hallways and miniature lobbies of a Times Square megaplex, then, is like stealing between people's private visions. I've paid $12.50 for admission into a movie theater with lax security, giving me freedom to roam the various screenings, and the movies I see constitute a Lynchian avant-garde composite. I glance at the audience’s faces before I sit. It’s comforting to see people laugh at the same time at the same punchline; comforting that an emotional majority can still be measured inside a multiplex.

Hometown: Los Angeles, Calif.

Fun Fact: Before launching a songwriting partnership with Suzanne Santo, guitarist Ben Jaffe composed music for Nickelodeon and various cartoon shows. Meanwhile, Santo paid the bills as an actress, landing supporting roles in Law & Order, Blind Justice and the Sigourney Weaver film Imaginary Heroes.

Why It's Worth Watching: Alternately rustic-retro and cool-contemporary, honeyhoney’s First Rodeo displays the common pop thread between alt.country, spaghetti western soundtracks and swampy blues.

For Fans Of: She & Him, Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazlewood, Jessie Baylin

Three days after the release of honeyhoney’s debut, bandmates Suzanne Santo and Ben Jaffe are on opposite coasts. Santo is spending the weekend in Atlanta, where her boyfriend has landed a job on the set of Road Trip 2. Meanwhile, Jaffe putters around the kitchen in Los Angeles, having chosen to stay home and enjoy the lingering warm weather. As his bandmate talks about the opulence of her hotel (“This is where they had the Gone with the Wind premiere!”) and the left-leaning population of Atlanta (“Everybody here seems ready to kick it with our main man, Obama.”), Jaffe valiantly offers up his own interesting tidbits.

The irony of Bay Shore Furriers and Leather Salon is that, while it’s the only building on the block that survived a fire six years ago, nobody seems to remember the lanky kid whose parents opened the store in the 1940s. He played linebacker for the junior-varsity team in the then-prosperous south-shore Long Island town, boxed groceries, graduated in 1947 and never really returned.

[Above: Detail of illustrated tote bag by Nina Barnes' Gemini Tactics for Of Montreal's limited-edition Skeletal Lamping swag.]

Of Montreal frontman (and Paste's November 2008 cover subject) Kevin Barnes and his wife Nina have been through a lot together since they met at a music festival in Oslo, Norway in 2001: A few amazing nights in Europe, months of long-distance email correspondence, flights across the Atlantic, a tour, plenty of musical and artistic collaboration, a wedding, a child, struggling to pay the bills, a painful breakup and a joyful reunion. In this exclusive Paste interview, Nina Barnes sheds some light on her husband and his work, and tells her side of the Of Montreal story.

Hometown: Brooklyn, N.Y.
Members: Daniel Rossen, Fred Nicolaus
Fun Fact: In Ear Park was recorded in an old church in Brooklyn where Grizzly Bear rehearses. "We just set up there right in front of a giant stained glass window, which is kind of cool," explains Nicolaus. "There's a lot of sounds on the record that come from the church, like the sound of a church organ turning on and off and us stomping around on the stairs and the sound of the pigeons that live in the widow. We weren't trying to consciously use the sounds of the space but you just cant help it, this enormous room where the ambient sound is going to get in there whether you want it to or not. So we tried to make something out of it."
Why It's Worth Watching: Despite some random label the press has bestowed upon the band, it's truly beautiful pop music at its best. "Folktronica is definitely a sound label that I’m not 100% behind," Nicolaus says. "I think about it like pop in that we try to write these melodies that are concise and direct and catchy."
For Fans Of: Dirty Projectors, Grizzly Bear, Inlets

Fred Nicolaus may have to quit his day job. Although neither of them studied music,  Nicolaus and Daniel Rossen formed the Department of Eagles in 2000 after being randomly assigned as roommates at NYU. "Every year that we've done it together it's gotten slightly more serious," Nicolaus says, "to the point where we occasionally refer to ourselves as a band. That was kind of a rule in the beginning, that we weren't a band."

Kevin Barnes is responsible for the music of Of Montreal, but his brother, visual artist David Barnes is a major factor in the band's aesthetic concept. David has worked on everything from T-shirts and posters to the band’s mind-boggling stage show and trippy album art, including the groundbreaking packaging for Of Montreal’s latest release, Skeletal Lamping (pictured above). While working on our November cover story, Paste associate editor Steve LaBate sat down with David for some insight into his work and relationship with his brother.

“Best Music Scene.” It’s a slightly absurd claim and unprovable to boot. But before you fire off that missive defending [insert your city here] as more vital and creative than Denton, allow me to refine the argument: Denton, Texas, is simply the paradigm of a healthy music community.

Check out Paste's top 50 albums of 2008...