The world being a judgmental cesspool, one of the unfortunate realities of life is that plain girls have to try a little harder. Based on a Thursday night Dick’s on Dicks show where she put out far more energy than she got back from a capacity crowd, Kate Nash understands that.

The Stockholm indie It Girl is the buzz of the blogs, with her bouncy mélange of electro-pop, girl-group gleefulness, and hipster dance music, but she says she’d rather lose it on the dance floor than surf the Web.

The Kills still sound dirty, distorted, and too cool for art school, but more than ever you can shake your ass to them on their third album, Midnight Boom.

From the way Sarah Assbring describes things, her hometown of Gothenburg, Sweden, isn’t exactly a sun worshipper’s paradise for most of the year. What makes the endless months of doom and gloom worth it, however, is the arrival of spring.

In their decade-plus of rocking out, the Dirtbombs have become ever more sophisticated in their quest for the unsophisticated. So it’s no surprise that the garage-rock act’s journey would take it to that bastion of the elite, the Cannes Film Festival. Or that, once there, the quintet would go over like George W. Bush belting out “La Marseillaise” at the Arc de Triomphe.

Congolese songwriter Mapumba is one of the strongest new voices out of Africa, an artist who knows what he wants and won’t accept compromises. When he couldn’t find a producer who shared his musical vision, he decided to make his debut album on his own. This entailed not only financing the project but studying sound engineering and building a home studio—then playing every instrument on the 12 original compositions.

Josh Grier may have grown up on the west coast of the U.S., but he’s lived in Minneapolis long enough to know that the idea of Manitoba as an ideal vacation destination is kind of ridiculous.

Chances are American Steel fans didn’t believe it when the group announced it was playing a show last year. After all, the Oakland punk act had been defunct for half a decade, and most of its members had moved on to the decidedly poppier project Communique. There was also the fact that the show was scheduled for April Fools’ Day. Fortunately for punk fans, the show was no joke.

The band has had more drummers than Spinal Tap, but Santa Fe Stalker suggests it was all worth it

It scooped the best music-video award at last month’s Okanagan Film Festival, not long after taking the “Best Use of Creativity” honours at New Jersey’s No Exit Music Video Festival in January. Now Vancouver’s TV Heart Attack is looking at a trifecta after scoring a Leo nomination for its “Bang Bang Bang” video. “We’re getting a lot of mileage out of a video we made for $500,” frontman Jason Corbett told the Straight.

It took a little longer than expected, but the Great Outdoors is here to remind you that spring has finally arrived. The local folk-pop collective has just released the first in a series of seasonally inspired EPs entitled, not surprisingly, Spring. Appropriately enough for Vancouverites, who have just endured the coldest April since 1972, according to Environment Canada, Spring was delayed by a few weeks. Frontman Adam Nation told the Straight, “It’s a little bit late.

Eagle-eyed NOFX fans should be on the lookout for various band members when they arrive in Vancouver today (May 8). The San Francisco punk veterans have scheduled a day off in the Rainy City before playing the Commodore on Friday night. “[Guitarist] Eric Melvin is really into hockey,” Melanie Kaye, a rep for the band’s label, Fat Wreck Chords, told the Straight. “He’s got a hockey game lined up on all three Canadian dates, so he’s bringing all his gear.

Hard Candy (Warner)

The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly (Hardly Art)

Memory Crash (Magna Carta)