Two new discs from three-word-named bands

* My Sister Ocean is going against the tide. Instead of feeding our needs for instant gratification, the local pop-rock duo is releasing its new album, one song per month, between now and November.

We Die Alone is the first track from The Month of Tuesday. The ditty is now available on iTunes or MSO's site. Each subsequent song will be released on the first Tuesday of each month. Burn The Truth is due Feb. 2, while Please Don’t Say It’s So follows March 2 ... and so on and so forth until November.

"I wanted to do something to promote this album that would give people something to look forward to all year. I also know that promoting the same album all year gets boring pretty quick, so I wanted to have an excuse to get the My Sister Ocean name out there more often," says frontman Holden Daniels.

"There are some other 'music business' type benefits such as getting more features on the stations that would never play us in rotation, but that regularly play us one time every time we release a single. I just got the chart numbers for the first week, and if we did these numbers every month instead of every 3-6 months like we used to, I think it will help us secure a decent summer tour, which was the real hope behind the whole concept.

"Who knows - music directors might hate the idea and they might stop playing anything we send them, but we're trying something different and I think the concept is fresh enough to stand out from the same old strategies that record labels have been using for years.

"What I really love about this idea is that none of our songs get picked as being 'better' or more 'radio friendly' than the other ones. They're all going to have their shot at radio, and we'll see at the end of the year which ones had more success.

"And even more exciting to me is the comfort in knowing that we did not write this album to be radio friendly. As a producer for other bands (Jezibelle, Parachute Penguin, Mockteerah, Cara Albo), I tend to have this notion of what makes a song radio friendly and I try to get songs to conform to those ideas. With all the new My Sister Ocean material, we threw out the radio rule book and just tried to write songs that would translate well in a live show; the irony is that a lot of them ended up being under 4 minutes and having hooky choruses (both great ingredients for radio).

"We have the ability to upload directly to iTunes through Edmonton label Oddball Productions, so since the process has been simplified, we figured we may as well try it."

My Sister Ocean will also be releasing three EPs, via Edmonton's new online shop, Music On Demand, throughout the year.

* Radio For Help’s second album, You Don’t Wanna Miss This, is in stores Tuesday, Jan. 19. The pop-rockers teamed up with R&B/pop singer Quanteisha Benjamin for their first single, Breathing, now available on iTunes.

The band will host its CD release party on Saturday, Jan. 30 at The Pawn Shop with The Flash Jam, Seventh Rain and Maryland. Tickets are $10 at the door.