Press Play on Hey Marseilles - To Travels and Trunks

While festivals like Lollapalooza, Bonaroo and Coachella get a lot of hype year after year for their huge line-ups of headlining talent it's the weeklong events of CMJ and SXSW that routinely capture my imagination. While the big, sprawling weekend extravaganzas offer the opportunity to see scores of huge names on one bill the small-club marathons in New York and Austin allow extremely talented, criminally overlooked acts to make a leap to the national stage. CMJ 2007 yielded one such gem in the form of a solo act armed with an acoustic guitar and a set of cracked, heartbreaking pipes. This intriguing find was none other than Bon Iver, who of course went on to explode in the indie world, even capturing the attention of Peter Gabriel.

I haven't been similarly blown away by anything at these two festivals in the two and a half years since, until SXSW 2010 yielded the Seattle folk orchestrations of Hey Marseilles. The band's full-length To Travels and Trunks - written in 2008 to be re-released this June - blew me away from the first listen of the first track.