Off the Record

Rise Above

Dead Oceans, the newest conduit of indie rock filtering from Bloomington, Ind.'s esteemed Secretly Canadian/Jagjaguwar, surfaces this week with its first album, Bishop Allen's The Broken String, a finely tuned assembly of pop songs. "Dead Oceans is in a unique position to achieve the notoriety of Jagjaguwar and Secretly Canadian in a much shorter amount of time because there's a much smaller learning curve involved," says label head Phil Waldorf, who, until recently, managed Misra Records, putting out more than 40 albums by artists like Centro-matic, Shearwater, and Destroyer since 1999. The locally based subsidiary should crest quickly following the September release of Dirty Projectors' Rise Above, an ingenious reworking of Black Flag's Damaged. The label has a wave of discs slated for 2008, including new work from Misra holdovers Evangelicals and Phosphorescent, as well as Iran's The Same Song Over and Over, a collaboration between TV on the Radio's Kyp Malone and Aaron Aites. Look too for Sixties pop throwback the Explorers Club and Citay, the enchanted psychedelic folk eightpiece led by former Piano Magic drummer Ezra Feinberg.