Florida’s own Surfer Blood will partner up with Brooklyn’s The Drums for a U.S. tour that kicks off in September. Surfer Blood is touring in support of Astro Coast and The Drums are promoting their new self-titled record.

The shows are sandwiched between European tour stops for The Drums, while Surfer Blood is busy hitting festivals including OYA, Pukkelpop, Reading and Bumbershoot. Tickets are now available at the tour’s very own website, and each comes with a poster.

Also, if you dig either record, The Drums are to thank.

Starting this Friday, headlining bands like Pavement, Modest Mouse and LCD Soundsystem will dominate Chicago’s Union Park for the annual Pitchfork Music Festival. The three-day fest also includes Big Boi, Surfer Blood, Panda Bear, Broken Social Scene, Here We Go Magic, El-P, Neon Indian, WHY?, Real Estate and dozens more.

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Kids have been writing loud rock songs with pretty parts since at least the 1960s–Pink Floyd, Genesis and King Crimson all blended rock with classical instrumentation and a dose of psychedelia. Then came bands like Queen–need we discuss “Bohemian Rhapsody?” We needn’t.

Orchestral, cinematic rock has enjoyed a revival in the past few years: Symphonies are opening their doors for all ages shows, Peter Gabriel released a cover album (David Bowie, Bon Iver, Arcade Fire) backed by a full orchestra, The Dodos opened for the Magik*Magik Orchestra. Or is it the other way around? Here we present a few new school orchestras making some noise in the indie rock world.

(MORE ON INDIE ORCHESTRAS)

Flashioning Backward through UI’s archives is like paging through your old middle school yearbook. You can’t help but hold your breath and hope your BFF Tracie wasn’t busted in perpetuity sporting those damn pink leg-warmers she insisted on wearing everywhere. Today, we’ve stumbled upon fragments of Crooked Fingers’ past.

CF lucked out–no fashion faux pas to be found. The Denver, CO, indie rockers are clearly more interested in keeping it real and sticking to what they get paid for (i.e., making music) than making waves on the catwalk.

Aggressively outré without being flashy about it, Crooked Fingers are the Prada of the music world. While a lot of outsiders don’t really get what it is they’re selling–more than just a pretty package; it’s like a philosophy on life wrapped in a pretty, tuneful package–music insiders totally get Eric Bachmann’s schtick. And whether they like the schtick or not, they can’t help but respect it.

It seems Bachmann’s yin and yang approach to album-crafting bleeds into his strange blend of hippie/professor, Hemingway/Lethem, dapper/slob style. Oh, and his love life too.

Below, check out why he aims to take a lover who’s the enemy of his music.

Hey there, kids. It’s time to strut our sartorial stuff and dive into fashion’s future with UI! Pull up a chair,  gaze into my custom-made Flashion Forward crystal ball and prepare to coquettishly zig and zag about the closets of UI’s fanciest, freshest new interviewees. Let’s examine the stylish physical and psychological baggage they pack their shizzle in.

The “indefinable” WHY? poses the question right up front so we don’t have to. Don’t you love folks who are clear about their inability to be clear right up front? I find it as bracingly refreshing as their recently released Eskimo Snow; a change of pace for the art-rappers, who, while never delivering bubble-gum poptastic status quo, could generally be counted on for a neatly packaged sweet n’ sour combo of banter and desolation.

It seems the boys of WHY? have become men: their fascinating but relentlessly inward-gazing musings on life and love (and how it affects them them them! Marcia Marcia Marcia!) have blossomed into full-blown explorations of the human psyche. And if you’re into that sort of thing, you’d be hard pressed to find an album that does it more succinctly and intelligently than Eskimo Snow.

Now, if we could only do something about that hair. I don’t know where I’d start, with their heads or their faces. Look! They’re as scared as we are. It’s possibly a reaction to how their dietary requirements were received while on tour in former Eastern Bloc states.  Don’t worry WHY? We still think you’re manly studs–even if you do eat salad.

Really!

Style, identity, art, self-expression. Join UI as we Flashion Forward to a magical aesthetic land through which we coquettishly zip about the closets of our fave new interviewees and explore their post-millennial closets to ferret out the physical and psychological baggage they pack their shizzle in.

This week, we’re checking out a recently added interview from our warehouse of clips to try to read between Those Dancing Days’ sartorial lines. The lovely ladies of TDD make our job easy, belly-flopping merrily into the deep end of UI’s style pool to consider the ever-pressing existential question: If you could be someone else for a day, who would it be, and what does that imply about one’s psychological/metaphysical/eschatological identity?

This, of course, is an issue that the young and adorable indie poppers who hail from Nacka, Sweden probably spend their evenings discussing. Clearly brainier than last week’s pop tart sensations, these ladies are more than flash in the pan–though still in high school when they started collecting critical valentines, they managed to produce an album that was a “curiously old-fashioned beast…tailor made for being listened to on vinyl,” simultaneously evoking the great girl groups of the ’60s, new wave and poppy punk fun.

Their style is a similar oddly cohesive mix of influences–’90s era grunge dresses paired with over-sized granny-gans, bad-ass chica cigarette pants and leather and whimsical hippie-punk farm gear.

Exploring different facets of personality and identity is the reason so many of us scamper joyfully to the closet every morning. It’s an opportunity to steep ourselves in a moody habiliment stew that reflects everything from our hormone levels to our desired station in life to the amount of beer we consumed last night.

And who can resist going a few steps further to wonder: If you could pull a freaky Friday switcheroo on someone, who would it be? Below, check out why TDD decided that being Paris Hilton or Lindsay Lohan for a day would be a lot more fun–and strangely educational–than trying on Obama’s life for size.

Queue up your cheesiest inner sassy speedfreak dance track–it’s time to Flashion Forward to a magical aesthetic land through which we coquettishly zip about the closets of our fave new UI-ers. Each week we pluck a recently added interview from our warehouse of current clips and try to read between the artist’s sartorial lines.

Today, we’re ogling Jill Sobule, a blond West Coast lass best known to the masses for her notorious 90′s tune (sing it with me now) “I Kissed a Girl,” a song that launched 1,000 wet dreams and 2,000 awkward “oh no she didn’t” moments between bosom buddies who may have had one too many shots of Amaretto Sour at Chip’s toga party during pledge week.

Despite the one-hit wonder risk Sobule took when she churned out such a Zeitgeisty tune, she withered not under the bright and insidious glare of her 15 minutes. She even continued to churn out laudable, autobiographical laments about identity, personal politics, emotions and sexuality in seven albums, three EPs and–of course–a greatest hits comp. Though, unlike “I Kissed A Girl,” none of her other music videos featured Fabio, an artistic choice I personally find distressing and problematic.

She may suffer from severe lapses in judgment re: beefcakes, but Sobule’s steely-eyed determination to stay in the musical game in the face of indie record collapse (her last two labels folded) is truly a post-Internet Age inspiration. Sobule created a site to snag fan donations so she could release her latest effort, California Years, herself. (She raised $85,000, $100 of which was reportedly donated by Fred Savage, bless his heart). The result: punchy pop with a grim message, delivered with enough sugar to make the medicine go down.

And like most music lifers, her image is in lockstep with her music: breezy, chic but vaguely disheveled, blond with roots, smiling but sad-eyed. Below, she chats with UI about being in this crazy world we call indie rock for the long haul.