Sometimes, to progress, you don’t necessarily need to burn everything down and start all over again. You don’t need a full-on reinvention, but a tweaking, a subtle shift; it’s less like rebuilding something from scratch than it is like cooking a dish you’ve cooked before…
I’ve got a bit of a complicated relationship with NY trio X Ambassadors; it’s been kind of an up-and-down thing, to say the least. I’ve been a fan since back before the added the “X” to the band’s name, first hearing their album Litost and falling head over heels for the whole damn thing…
Even back when they were Yet Another Band with Melodic Guitars and Shy-Boy Vocals on an Emo Diaries comp (that’s where I first heard ’em, at least, literally 20 freaking years ago), Kansas band The Appleseed Cast was always a bit different. A bit smarter, maybe, more thoughtful and with more intent to what they were doing…
It hasn’t even been a full decade since the first time I heard The Wheel Workers — which was then less a “band” and more just frontman/songwriter Steven Higginbotham yelling (okay, okay, speaking eloquently) into the void — but in the intervening years, it feels like we’ve seen change enough to last a century…
It’s bizarre to even type it, but it’s been longer than I’d realized since I last heard anything from one of my favorite bands, Edinburgh’s We Were Promised Jetpacks. They released the stellar Unravelling back in 2014, and I loved it, and I finally got to see the band play live and loved that, too, and then…well, nothing, for a good long while…
Hey, Ex-Optimists crew; look, we need to talk. I mean, I love y’all — you know I do — but it’s starting to creep me out having you rummage around inside my head and pulling out all the damn sounds I loved back in college. It feels like some Inception-level shit, y’know? I’d appreciate it if you’d at least let me know when you’re going to do it…
Andrew W.K. has always been an enigma, at least to me; truthfully, it’s part of his charm. Is he serious about his whole “Party Hard” shtick? How can anybody be that goddamn positive all the freaking time? That can’t be real, can it? Is it all a big put-on, a character he’s playing, like an Adult Swim version of an irrepressibly upbeat kids’ TV show host?…
I may have underestimated Matt Costa. No, scratch that — going by Santa Rosa Fangs, I definitely underestimated Matt Costa. I’ve only seen him live once, back in the mid-2000s when he was touring with surf-folk guy Jack Johnson; my wife was a big Jack Johnson fan, at the time…
Once upon a time, there was an awesome, promising young indie-rock band called Ruiners; they released a handful of songs, one of which, “One,” lived in my head for about six months straight. And then, they were gone. Singer/guitarist Shan Pasha moved to London to go to school…
The first time I saw this band play, they were, well, pretty damn different from what they are now. See, if you’d asked me back then what Jody Seabody & The Whirls — a four-piece that currently consists of Clint Rater on drums, Bryce Perkins and Dave Merriett on guitar, and Stuart Perkins on bass — sounded like…
When I first listened to WATERWORLD, the newest EP from The Wiggins, aka Jon Read, a surprising thing happened. I was in the car, driving my 8-year-old around, and as the first strains of lead track “Dreamland” convulsed through the speakers, all raw, fucked-up percussion, scratchy production, overfuzzed guitars, and sung-chanted-snarled vocals…
The first time I listened to The Suffers’ new album, Everything Here, I was sitting on a desert island in the Caribbean; no, seriously, that’s what happens when you’ve got vacation time booked but you also need to actually keep up with reviewing stuff…
If you’re an artist of any kind, whether it’s music or painting or writing or photography or whatever, editing is one of the hardest things to do. And no, I don’t mean the actual action of editing is hard — hell, that’s what I do for a living, and it doesn’t really take a lot beyond a nitpicky eye…
So, a thing happened with quirky, half-smirking/half-serious indie-pop, one-woman “band” Hearts of Animals — I suspect it happened a while ago, maybe even when 2015’s Another Mutation came out, but I guess it didn’t really click for me until listening to Human Size. I like to think I’m pretty perceptive about stuff like this…
I was skeptical, it’s true. When I read the initial press about famed indie-rock band Superchunk’s latest release, What a Time to Be Alive, proclaiming it was the band’s best album ever, or at the very least, in more than 20 years, I couldn’t help but raise an eyebrow — “yeah, right. Here we go…”
I’ve got a serious soft spot when it comes to funk — there was this whole phase in college back in the ’90s, plus some time spent combing bins at record stores and all that, yadda, yadda, and while I’ve generally shifted away from it in later years in terms of stuff I listen to regularly, that initial love still burns deep down in my heart…
Omotai, I’ve missed you. It feels like I just haven’t been listening to enough truly, truly heavy, head-kicking, ear-shattering music lately, probably not for nearly a year; hell, even the metal I’ve been listening to recently has been generally on the more melodic side of the spectrum. Beyond that, I’ve been on a fairly steady diet of synth-y pop, EDM, and ’70s throwback rock lately…
Damn. I’ve been thinking back and realized that it’s been two damn decades since I first heard Arthur Yoria play and sing — I think it was back when he was with late-’90s pop band Lavendula — which says something both about how old I feel these days and, much more importantly, how seasoned and accomplished a musician and songwriter Yoria is…
Well, damn. If you asked me to paint a picture of the quintessential band of modern-day, London-bred punks, I don’t think I could do much better than actual South Londoners Shame. They’re young, raw, and unapologetically in-your-face, with lyrics that both want a fight and to just say “ah, fuck off” at the same time…
Let me be clear right here, right now: Sarah Shook’s voice ain’t for everybody. It’s not pretty, it’s not seductive, it’s not bright or cheery or sweet or any of that other stuff people normally go for when it comes to female vocalists in music, including in country music. When Shook sings, her vocals are rough around the edges…
Lately, I’ve been really, really slow about writing reviews of stuff I’ve received; I’m ashamed to admit it, I have to say, but it’s true. Sometimes, I’ve been so freaking behind that by the time I’m able to put on the headphones and listen to an album…
Metal — well, good metal, at least — is a delicate balancing act. That seems weird to say, really, given that it’s a musical genre built around heaviness, whether you’re talking about guitars or drums or even vocals, but it’s true. Going too far in any one direction can derail a band’s sound completely…
While I’ve only heard Memphis-dwelling folksinger Julien Baker relatively recently, it hasn’t taken long for her to leave me stunned and amazed with my mouth wide open. I’m reluctant to use the “folksinger” tag, honestly, because it doesn’t really do Baker’s music justice…
I wasn’t sure how much I’d like Beast Epic, the new album by Iron & Wine, aka Sam Beam. I knew he’d softened a bit since the early days, gotten less gritty, less dark in general — and hey, I can’t fault him for that. You can only be dark and moody for so long…
“That’s funny,” my wife told me earlier this week, “I didn’t know you were an Afghan Whigs fan.” And at first, I was a little affronted. How could she not know that, after all these years? Except that, as I thought about it, I realized that I’d kind of set aside the Cincinnati band for quite a while…
I’ve listened to and been a fan of the music Sergio Trevino and Haley Lynch (formerly Haley Barnes) have made in their own little realms for years now, he with roots-pop band Buxton and solo and she with delicate indie-pop outfit Dollie Barnes, rock band VODI, and solo, but until now…
Opeth have divided their fans over the last few years by taking a musical approach that can barely be called metal, much less the brutal, technical death metal with which they made their name. Longtime fans seem to fall into one of two camps: some refuse to accept the new music because it’s “not Opeth”, while others think Michael Akerfeldt and company can do no wrong…
For a large chunk of my life, I would proudly declare to anybody who’d listen that I hated country music. I got downright righteous about it, honestly, for reasons that would probably only make sense to teenage wannabe music nerds with inflated senses of their own importance. And yeah, I’d imagine it was pretty freaking annoying…
One of the best things I can say about any album, and even more so for an EP, is that it felt like it went by too fast, that I wanted it to keep going. That’s where I am with Miears’ new Who Will Save You? EP; it’s alluring and lush and intense, and I just want to hear more of it, or at least the whole damn thing, over and over again….
Red Fang are a conundrum of a band, one that I love for seemingly totally diametrically opposed reasons. On the one hand, I love their over-the-top, raw, heavy-as-fuck, metal sensibilities, the kind that write songs to make you punch the roof of your beat-to-shit old car…
With their new, self-titled EP, down-low, funky/reggaeified pop trio Jerk has staked out some impressively new, (mostly) unexplored territory. The Houston-dwelling band starts off sounding like a kind of downtempo…
I love Keeton Coffman. Until now, I’ve been unable to even start to explain why; there’s just something about the guy’s voice that works for me, pulling me along with the song. It helps that he’s got this Springsteenian delivery I dig, sure…
Things have changed a fair bit for Seattle band The Head and the Heart, these past few years. Most famously, frontman Josiah Johnson has been struggling with addiction, which means that while he wrote/co-wrote the songs on Signs of Light — particularly the title track, which closes out the album…
It’s been a long road for The Dandy Warhols. They’ve occupied a very specific niche, it seems like, over the course of their 20-plus-year career, standing at the intersection between psychedelic rock, Brit-influenced pop, and indie-rock, and despite being real-live adults these days…
I heard this too late by a month or so, it feels like; here in Houston, despite it still being too goddamn hot to willingly spend significant time outdoors, summer’s finally on its way out, giving way to what passes for “Autumn” in these parts (i.e., “chilly” temps most Northerners would snicker at, although I’d dare ’em to try to survive the heart of summer down here…). See, Ra Ra Riot’s Need Your Light is, at its core, a summer album, at least to these ears…
I went into Lucky Ones, the fourth album from The Crookes, with some trepidation. See, everything I’d heard or read about the Sheffield band focused on how singer George Waite’s voice seriously sounded just like Morrissey’s…and, to the unending horror of my wonderful, Morrissey-loving wife, I’ve never been a fan…
I’ll confess to being pretty disappointed in recent years with punk rock in general. Maybe I’m showing my age, but seriously, most of what I’ve heard lately has left me pretty cold, to the point where I’ve wondered if it’s really worth listening to as much anymore. Then, as happens at times like these, the Universe steps in to tell me I’m wrong, and I’m being a moron…in this case, “the Universe” being Pennsylvania rock dudes Beach Slang…
Alright, so I definitely need to quit referring to — and thinking of, beyond that — Adam Bricks as a folksinger. Because with Relations, he’s pretty much taken that label and lit it on fire, smiling, and then roared on past its accepted boundaries like he’s trying to craft something completely different. And yes, that’s a very, very good thing. Best of all, I think he knows exactly what he’s doing…
“A Tale of Two Elvises” — that’s what keeps popping into my head, weirdly, as I listen to John Evans’ new album Polyester. And it does make sense, kind of, as the album rolls on. I’ll explain how in a minute, but at the root, it’s because, see, Polyester isn’t much like what I’ve heard from Evans…
I never thought I’d say it, but I’m at the point in the whole emo-revival thing where it’s the bands who aren’t truly “emo” anymore that are the most interesting to me. I’m talking about the ones who blend together the original emo/post-emo stuff with, hell, I dunno, folk or prog or barroom rock…
