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.

When you need a break, head to the comedy stage for Wet Hot American Summer’s Michael Showalter, “Daily Show” correspondent Wyatt Cenac and “Saturday Night Live” writer and Chicago native Hannibal Buress. There are also plenty of afterparties, so keep an ear out.

Although tickets for Saturday and Sunday are currently sold out, a limited number will be available for purchase at the Union Park box office tomorrow, Thursday, July 15.

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.

The Seattle Rock Orchestra has approximately one zillion members, all local classical and pop professionals (now that’s an awesome title to have on your resume). They’ve accompanied Jeremy Enigk and Damien Jurado, but recently generated interest with a performance of Arcade Fire’s entire Funeral, which you can check out on their MySpace page.

Austin-based Tosca String Quartet have accentuated many a stage and album since forming in the ’90s, including performances with Spoon, Ray LaMontagne, Vampire Weekend, DeVotchka and Arcade Fire (those guys are everywhere), as well as a four-year tour stint with David Byrne. More recently the ladies recorded tracks for Laura Viers’ July Flame. Two free downloads are available at Viers’ site.

Brand new on the scene, The Cascade are next in line of orchestral rock. The 15-member group has upcoming shows in New York City and Washington, D.C (their hometown), and there’s a free download of the swaying “Make This Night Ours” available on their site.

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.

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!

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.

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.

Orchestral/electro indie rockers The Age of Rockets seem to have to the whole hipster nerd boys and girls thing going for them–they’re all Converse, fluttery layers of vintage clothing with odd button arrangements, pasty skin and dark hair. These are the peeps with whom one enjoys imbibing the champagne of beers, right? Wrong!

Don’t be fooled by their awesomely blended organic electro musical creations that surely reveal wise and kind souls, because really? The Age of Rockets crew up so hard there’s gotta be at least once where they talk smack about you and your friends. (We still can’t help but like their plaid, though).

And what a strange and wonderful land it is: musical polymath Emil Svanängen of Sweden managed to create a genuinely unique aural terrain in the…wait for it…basement of his parents’ home, giving unemployed geniuses (and their folks) everywhere hope that they, too, will produce the next great novel, symphony or work of art while wallowing in the glories of free food, laundry and cable.

Loney Dear’s music–hammering, ecstatic, delicate, steely, soulful and engineered with an exactitude rivaled only by particularly rigorous car manufacturers auf Deutschland–sounds like Emil looks, in all of his blond, vintage T-shirt glory.

He appears to be some kind of happy cross between a stern Viking and a naughty, adolescent Cupid without the sobering influence of Venus. Ivory-skinned and cherubic, with eminently pinchable cheeks, he seems like your bad-influence bestie, your secretly sweet (but outwardly tough guy) boy (or girl) friend, the lab partner you cheated off of in Bio and the drinking buddy who always makes you stay ’til last call, rolled into one adorable, dance-along package.

Check out Emil’s impish take on the dubious talent of techno creators and the invariably great music their often lackluster sequencing abilities produce.

Fashion and music often make strange bedfellows and while we won’t dare attempt to penetrate the existential mystery that is heinous rock dude’s inexplicable ability to bed every model west of the Volga River, we will take our greasy paws and grapple with more prosaic perplexities — such as trying to figure out WTF it is that these zany musicians are strapping onto their carcasses these days and what it implies about their musical POA. Sometimes, like sex, it’s better the second time around.

Here’s this week’s stylish blast from the past for your aesthetic cogitation. Today, we’re revisiting balmier days with a sunny artist who’s prone to the occasional flash of thunder. When UI caught up with uber-earnest singer-songwriter Juliana Hatfield, she was perched in a basic black cotton scoop-neck on a hot pink soft shaggy throw and looked every inch the Boston indie rocker she is.

Hatfield’s blend of somber (but girly), harsh (but melodic), jagged (but sweet), punk (but pop) music provided the perfect soundtrack for the Prozac Nation 90′s. Her punk/hippie style with a tank-top/t-shirt, gloriously worn jeans/broken in leather clothes and side-parted pin-straight hair make her a pin-up girl for disaffected, surly girls (and grrrls) everywhere. It’s always interesting to see whom our former idols idolize themselves. So who gets Juliana’s creative juices flowing? Henry Rollins. Check out her straight-forward beauty, simple style and smart, cute girlness (yes, she’s still somehow girly even though she’s in her 40′s–see for yourself).