It’s been almost five years since we’ve seen Brendan Benson come through town, but the Detroit-bred singer/songwriter is making his return to the Valley with a Feb. 22 show at the Rhythm Room. It’s a 21-and-over show and tickets ($13 advance / $15 day of) are available here. Frank Fairfield, profiled last summer by Weiss, is the opener.

Benson is touring in support of his 2009 release My Old, Familiar Friend after spending time touring and releasing two albums with Jack White and the Raconteurs. I’m excited to see him in solo form with a touring band that includes Brad Pemberton on drums (Ryan Adams), Jared Reynolds on bass (Ben Folds) and Mark Watrous on guitar and keys (the Raconteurs).

• Brendan Benson | Feel Like Taking You Home

I haven’t even finished collecting my thoughts for 2009 and already I’m certain 2010 is going to blow last year out of the water.

One of the albums I’m most looking forward to in ’10 is the new one from Canadian psych-rockers The Besnard Lakes, who on March 9 will unveil The Besnard Lakes Are the Roaring Night, which already can stake claim to best cover art of the year (see above).

On Wednesday, the band and Jagjaguwar offered the first single from the album, Albatross, which also will be released as a 12-inch single on Feb. 9 with an exclusive b-side, Four Long Lines.

Albatross is predictably spacious and epic, but I get the feeling it’s only a small hint of what’s to come on Are the Roaring Night.

• The Besnard Lakes | Albatross

RELATED:
The Besnard Lakes: Devastation (video)
Favorite albums of 2007
The Besnard Lakes, Modified, 9/20/07

When I finally get around to posting my favorite albums of 2009 (hey, some people still have Christmas lights up, OK?), you’ll find Japandroids’ Post-Nothing on there – an album I came to late, but one that made an immediate impact.

Unfortunately, some people – ahem – don’t share my enthusiasm for the duo’s album or the just-announced April 19 tour stop at The Trunk Space in Phoenix. Tickets for the all-ages show are $12 and available here.

I’m not gonna sit here and tell you Brian King and David Prowse are breaking new musical ground, but there’s a reckless energy to Post-Nothing that I needed in what I considered a mostly blah year. There’s also something oddly comforting to hear a couple of young punk rockers going through something of a mid-life crisis, already reminiscing about the good times before they’re even over (at least for them): “We used to dream / Now we worry about dying / I don’t wanna worry about dying / I just wanna worry about those sunshine girls.”

• Japandroids | Young Hearts Spark Fire

As I found out in summer 2008, Travis singer Fran Healy is incredibly genuine and forthright with fans. So I guess it wasn’t surprising to see him on Twitter announce a new Web site, where I discovered he’s working on a solo album and has posted a demo of one of the tracks.

The album is called Wreckorder and Healy offered some insight on his thought process and motivation to record it:

“I love making demos. I would bring them to the band and we would re-record them and make them sound better/more professional but the thing which made the demo magic would always be lost in the final recordings. We would have demo-itis early on, trying to recapture that “thing”. It took a while to realise our time would be better spent trying to make new moments. I suppose that “thing” is just connected to the first time you do something. There is a certain cool carelessness which comes from not knowing where something is leading you. The usual procedure would be write songs-make demos-take demos to band-make album. Taking Travis out of the flow chart meant the recording process would stop at demo stage. But it would have to sound good too.

So I bought a nice old 10 channel recording desk and some beautiful microphones and began making new demos. Writing for something other than Travis was a great release. There was no baggage. No map. When I had enough cool moments, I asked the producer, Emery Dobyns, to come out to Berlin and we finished them together, adding overdubs and embellishing.”

He also spoke of recording demos with Neko Case (!) and getting Paul McCartney (!!!) to play bass on one track. That’s what’s known as a “good get.” If you’re a gear nerd, Healy also posted pics of what he’s using in the studio.

More important, he graciously shared a demo of a new song called Holiday, a song that seems to capture his feelings of a rocky point in Travis’ recent re-emergence. The lyrics are cathartic, if not dripping in self-pity: “Don’t be fooled cause you could do without me / I think I need a holiday / Another time another place / To disappear without a trace / When I return throw me away.”

• Fran Healy | Holiday (demo)

A new Born Ruffians release is one of many albums I’m looking forward to in 2010. (It’s called Say It and it’s due out early in the year, by the way.)

In the meantime, Ruffians singer/guitarist Luke Lalonde has new material out in the form of a side project called Novels, a collaboration among five Toronto musicians — Lalonde, Graham Wright (Tokyo Police Club), Will Currie (Will Currie & the Country French), Dean Marino (Ex~Po) and Jason Sadlowski — whose goal was to write/arrange/record a five-song EP in a 24-hour period.

Here’s what the band had to say about the project:

In January of 2009, five of us locked ourselves away in Chemical Sound Studios in Toronto with the goal of writing, arranging, and recording an EP from scratch in one marathon session. When we stumbled out the door in the wee hours of the next morning, we found ourselves with what we’re now calling NOVELS.

NOVELS won’t be sold in CD stores, on the internet, or anywhere else. Instead, we’ll give them away, or put them places. Maybe you’ll find a copy sitting on a park bench. Maybe a masked man will hand you one as he passes you on the street. Maybe none of these things will happen. But we’ll make sure that everyone gets a chance to listen if they want to.

As such, they are offering a free download of the EP and an inside look at the process via video shot by documentary filmmaker Wade Vroom and photos from the studio.

• Novels | This Wouldn’t Be the Last Time