From August 14-16, The Museum of Fine Arts Houston screened a beautifully restored 35mm print of Z in the Brown Auditorium to sell-out crowds as part of their ongoing Revival Series. Constantin Costa-Gavras’ 40-year-old procedural about an investigating judge…
In a way, I should’ve seen it coming. I mean, looking backwards now, with the dubious benefit of hindsight, it’s like the Teenage Kicks guys wrote it all out in the songs, telegraphing their own demise. And with Uptight, they’ve assembled it all together in one place…
It’s hard to know at first if Sage Francis wants to be taken seriously on his latest mixtape, Sick of Wasting, with song titles like “Masterbate Your Brain” and “Who Farted_pt 1.” Then he comes at you, though, with a purist, traditionalist interpretation of hip-hop…
With El Payaso, it should come as no surprise that Texas’ legendary Johnny Goudie (of Johnny Goudie & The Little Champions) is still rock’n along and just as prolific as ever, albeit this time with a twangy country tinge, happier, pop-rocky explosion…
I can’t entirely put my finger on why, but it always seems to take me quite a while to fully wrap my head around an Arbouretum album. With 2007’s Rites of Uncovering, I found myself compelled to listen and re-listen and re-listen to the disc…
Digable Cat spent two years working on Letters from my Dreams, and it shows, but not everyone may be able to handle the emphasis on the singing. This band originates in Illinois, but singer Alina Giurgiu is Romanian, and she packs a punch…
Remember when two-piece bands were a novelty and seemed so exciting and new? Now they’re as commonplace as the acts that they pretend to be superior to. Chinese is a two-piece instrumental act from Seattle that’s just released a “noise-rock” adventure…
The Whore Moans’ Hello From the Radio Wasteland is an energetic little piece of music from Seattle that sounds ready to take on the world. It consists of passionate singing that leads to screaming by the end of the line, lots of backup vocals to carry on the intensity…
This band has potential; trust me, a lot of potential. This record could signal a decision point, because they have two sounds going: a punk approach like that of At The Drive In, and a post-hardcore, early Drop Dead Gorgeous kind of vibe…
Too “indie” to be punk… Really, I can’t understand this mentality; it’s the fun, happy “go out and party!” attitude and approach to making music, and I just don’t understand. Sure, some of the songs on Survival Mode are okay…
If music is aural communication with the spiritual, then the blues would be its sacred book of hymns. That’s just what the Snake Charmers’ sultry release Been Gone Too Long personifies in spades. As lead singer and songwriter Marie Angell seductively sings…
I hope that when it’s my time to die, the new Dodos album will be playing in the background for my last 45 minutes. The indie group released its fourth album, Time To Die, on September 15, and I like it a lot…
For all of you beginner students: Class of 1984 will be on the exam, so now’s the time to become learned in class-speak. Jon and James, (fine Irish brothers) have been jammin’ “backwoods filthy rock” in and around Eire since early 2006…
I’m going to be honest and lay the facts on the table. This review has been over due for about two months. Okay six, but who’s counting? Well, okay, maybe my editor is, but that’s beside the point. This review is late partly because I became overwhelmed and put too much on my plate…
The Black Crowes have just released Before the Frost/Until the Freeze, a double album — sort of. This innovative release is the hard copy of Before the Frost…, with an online code for …Until the Freeze…
They don’t make them like this anymore. One of the most surprising things I found about Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner was that I hadn’t seen it yet. A friend of mine (who knows I’ve see everything) just naturally assumed I had…
It feels like an eternity ago that Joshua Tillman found me, on that infamous, international, online “social” (yet not so social) networking site. I suppose if there’s any redeeming quality to Myspace beside the huge impact it’s had on the music world…
More than anything else, Searching for Signal’s new EP, It’s So Bright, feels, well, deliberate. Each note feels carefully selected and placed right where guitarists Matthew Salois and Michael Aziari want them to be, anchored from floating off on its own…
Battle for the Sun is a much-anticipated CD for those die-hard Placebo fans who were disappointed by the band’s last album, Meds. This CD, number six, reverts back to band’s old style, with somewhat squealing guitars over Brian Molko’s nasal but forever reassuring voice…
Plenty has been said of Oh No Not Stereo and their brand of emo-laden pop rock. Of their latest release, 003, some say their pop sensibilities are too formulaic and forgettable. Others say that Oh No Not Stereo has arisen to fill the musical void left when New Found Glory and Good Charlotte changed their sound…
Experimenting with different genres yet staying true to their overall sound, The Nuclear Children have come up with an EP that would knock aside some of today’s big acts. While throwing in a few references to The Rolling Stones, The Nuclear Children have a sound that mixes The Vines…
The Informant! is the story of Mark Whitacre (Matt Damon), a scientist, VP, and whistleblower at the giant agri-business food additive company Archer Daniels Midland, which specializes in using corn to take over the world…
The Guns of Detroit. The name alone got me. I hadn’t heard one lick of their music, and yet I already knew that I wanted to review their album, Monsterattake’s. It was a gamble I knew I had to take. The Guns of Detroit, I thought, could’ve been death metal from the dark corners of Sweden…
So you say your band’s releasing its new album only on cassette? That’s so, er, early 2009, y’all. Want to really take a totally noncommercial, ultra-indie stab in the dark with your band’s next release? Follow the example of strange, candy-like electro-hip-hopsters Ghost Mountain…
Just when you think that the album’s going to be an intimate experience between just you and Chad VanGaalen, slowly he starts cranking up the volume, changing your opinion of the path the album will take little by little. Then track five, “Bare Feet On Wet Griptape,” comes on…
For the past few years, Canada’s indie-rock scene has been dominated by one label that encompasses one genre and even one city. It’s the kind of warm and calm folk-infused indie-rock that’s completely unobjectionable and well-received by all, like maple syrup or the concept of universal health care…
Man at Arms is a crazy-cool two-man band that will have you turning your head to see if there are any more band members. It’s insane how these two guys can simply blow you out your mind with their short but punchy EP, A Waste Of Time And Space…
While there’s nothing strictly wrong with the first two tracks of Fake Believe’s five-song EP, Talk Speak, I’ll admit they had me a little worried. The too-slick, hipster-ish dance-funk grooves on the verses of both “Pornography” and “Another Dead Romantic” didn’t get more than a shrug out of me…
Electric Owls’ Ain’t Too Bright is an album that I’d recommend to a dope-smoking pre-pubescent. If nothing else, you can expand your street drug vocab. From the song “Kamiakin”: “Summertime won’t be so bad / We can all get high over at my uncle’s trailer / He’s a real cool guy…”
I’ve been dancing around it a while in my head, and I just can’t think of a friendly, nice way to talk around it, so I’m just going to say it: I don’t like the guitars on Electric Attitude’s latest EP, Laser Laser Laser Beams. At least, I don’t like ’em as much as I feel like I should…
Dillinger is Dead is called writer/director Marco Ferreri’s masterpiece. It recently screened at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston as part of their Revival Series (http://www.mfah.org/films), a restored 35mm print that looks and sounds brilliant…
There’s just something strangely cool about seeing the new Behemoth CD/DVD, Evangelion, advertised in the Sunday ad for Best Buy. Right next to upcoming indie-rockers and pop-start wannabes is this trio of corpsepaint-wearing Polish Satanists. Fucking awesome…
It hit me in the car, on my way back to the house yesterday, and suddenly, it all seemed plain as day: it’s Paul McCartney. That’s who Fruit Bats’ Eric D. Johnson reminds me of, more than anyone else, at least on the band’s latest, The Ruminant Band…
I’m honestly not sure what I was expecting, but I know this wasn’t it. I think I could be forgiven, though, for being blindsided by Sleepy Sun’s Embrace, especially considering the way the band shifts gears partway in. The album starts off with the thumping, dark, nearly funky murk-croon…
“Retro” has become a bad word in the musical world. First we had the ’70s stoner bands, the neo-thrash bands, and the revival of glam. So what’s a band like Nebula supposed to do, when they were retro before retro was a cool, and subsequently uncool, thing to be?…
Hailing from the hipster central town of Austin, Iron Age offers their latest, The Sleeping Eye, for all to enjoy. Hopefully. When you see any album from Tee Pee Records, there’s a good chance that it should come equipped with rolling papers…
Psychedelic music often gets a bad rap for its close kinship to ’60s hippie culture. Despite modern psychedelic rock’s distance from its groovier brethren, its dedication to mind-altering substances often does the music more harm than good…
Reviewing Vetiver’s latest release, Tight Knit, has been a most pleasant experience. Self-classified as “Thrash/Black Metal/Christian Rap”on their MySpace page — proof positive the band does have a sense of humor — the band tends to get tagged as “Freak Folk” or “crippled pigeon music” by reviewers…
In the overflowing racks of DVDs at your local record store, the subject of stoner rock has long been neglected. The void has now been filled, however, with the release of Such Hawks Such Hounds. The film is the culmination of three years work by John Srebalus…
There’s a lot to like on La Snacks’ Newfangled EP, with all its throwback-ness to my own personal indie-rock heyday, when Pavement was great, The Pixies and Sebadoh were gods, and Spoon weren’t famous yet. It’s got a great, fuck-it-all looseness to it…
