Well, damn. Welcome The Worms, the brand-damn-new full-length from L.A. trio Bleached — two members of which, sisters Jennifer and Jessica Clavin, you might remember from late-2000s band Mika Miko — grabbed tight to my skeptic self from the very first note of “Keep On Keepin’ On” and refused to let go ’til the very end of “Hollywood, We Did It All Wrong”…
Jon Read may not have been born in the sweaty, swampy, dirty depths of Houston, Texas, but the city fits him like a (tattered, weird-smelling) glove. There’s just something about that raw, ripped-open, messy, muddy sound Read’s crafted over the course of his 15 years or so of his musical career…
Sometimes the process is as cool as the product. (Well, almost as cool, anyway.) That’s definitely how I’m feeling about singer/songwriter and sometime The Rebecca West frontwoman Cameron Dezen Hammon’s latest…
Simple works. It just does, just about every damn time. And with This Stupid Stuff, four-piece punk rock crew Giant Kitty prove that over and over and over again. Even for a punk band these days, they’re refreshingly old-school, dancing across the grey area…
Bad news first: no, this isn’t a brand-new full-length from quirky, beach-loving popsters Deep Cuts. That release is coming, yes, but this isn’t it, not yet. Instead, Gulf Coast Companion Vol. 1 is an everything-up-to-now compilation of all the music the supremely talented quintet has thrown out there, all cleaned up and shiny and bubbly and sunshiny. Oh, and it’s a cassette, that least-beloved of formats for seemingly everybody but me. I’ve gotten grief from multiple people about my love for cassettes…
More and more these days, I find myself admiring bravery when it comes to rock music; it’s a whole lot cooler, to me, to do something strange and different than it is to ride the same damn riffs and song structures and whatnot (well, okay, as long as the music itself works, but we’ll get to that)…
I wasn’t sure what to make of David Ramirez’s latest full-length, Fables, not at first. I was expecting something more like the fiery Rooster, or maybe the downtrodden reconciliation of Apologies, but what I heard instead was a slate of (mostly) low-key, almost fragile songs that were slow-moving to the point of somnolence at times. I didn’t feel let down, not exactly, but I didn’t feel entirely satisfied, either…
Ever met someone who was, say, in a relationship with somebody, and you knew immediately that it wasn’t going to work — that something just wasn’t quite right, didn’t quite fit the way it was supposed to? Not that either person was bad, but that they weren’t right for one another? That’s how I feel about Hank Schyma, aka Pecos Hank, tornado-chaser, musician, videographer, and all-round larger-than-life dude…
Alright, so I’m gonna go out on a little bit of a limb, here: I think Jealous Creatures’ latest full-length, The Night Goes on for Days, is a sneaky, semi-secret, undeclared concept album of sorts. No, I’m serious. If I’m wrong, I’m sure the folks in the band will set me straight, but after repeated listenings to Night, it’s hard for me to escape the idea…
Oh, hell yes. From the very first blast of boogie-rawk guitar and distorted, half-snarled vocals on their eponymous debut LP, the Knights of the Fire Kingdom make it absolutely goddamn clear both what they are and what they are not, in equal measure. What they are is a straight-up, nitro-burning rock band…
Screw that whole “bands get quieter and more mellow as they get older” thing; who the hell wants that? The Wheel Workers, for one, sound like they’ve actually gotten louder and angrier as they’ve matured, band-wise, and I’m here to tell you that yes, that’s a very good thing. See, back in 2013 the band released their stellar second album, Past to Present, which pretty much took any problems I might’ve had with the band’s earlier stuff and threw them, smiling, into a running garbage disposal…
Sometimes, even when I really, really like a band — like is the case with, say, Houston-dwelling emo purveyors Football, etc. — there’s just some little thing/person/whatever missing to shove the whole thing over the edge into “holy crap, this is amazing” territory. Going by Football, etc.’s new four-song EP, Disappear, it looks like that thing is badass producer J. Robbins. Okay, that’s not all that’s happening here…
This album is in my Top 5 for 2014. I’m giving it 5 stars not just because I love the album (I do), but because it is that most rare of albums these days: an actual masterpiece. John Bassett steps away from his band, KingBathmat, and puts the focus solely on himself. Although he is the singer, bass player, and songwriter for KingBathmat, the songs are written with a band environment in mind…
As I’ve proclaimed a few times before in these pages, it’s no small thing to try to convey an emotion, a feeling, using music alone. With a vocalist standing out in front of the band, you can make things a lot more clear, declare your intentions more succinctly, and actually pull the audience along with you to where you want them to go emotionally. If the lyrics of a song are about someone dying, then odds are good…
I found it really difficult to write this review, a whole lot harder than I’d ever expected I would. Now, in case you’re one of those people who only reads the first paragraph of a review and makes their mind up then and there, let me clarify that I don’t mean this review was hard to write because I don’t like The Church of Philadelphia’s long-awaited second album, We’re Gonna Dance Tonight. On the contrary, I absolutely love it…
Four years is a long time for anybody, and even longer for a musician, who’s liable to spend large chunks of that time on the road, scrabbling and scraping for any way they can somehow get ahead and avoid going broke doing what they love. It’s a long time in which you might stumble, might fall…
Midway through listening to A Sundae Drive’s most recent full-length, the followup to 2011’s excellent, You’re Gonna Get Me, it hit me just how, well, how dark it is. There’s a murky, bitter edge to the band’s sound on here, despite the seemingly cheery pop melodies…
For Floridian doom-metal heroes Torche, Restarter feels kind of like a homecoming. I say “kind of,” mind you, because this isn’t really a step backwards as much as it is an integration of the band’s earlier, heavier sounds with the poppier experiment that was 2012’s Harmonicraft. At the same time, though, the album feels very much akin to Meanderthal…
I will admit that I first listened to The Coasts because my friend and former co-worker, Ike Peters, is in the band. I spent my money on their first two albums (The Coasts and Santa Fe), though, because I actually liked them. The Coasts play lo-fi, indie pop-rock that is simultaneously fun and thoughtful, with bouncy melodies and some deceptively simple…
I’ve never seen A Place To Bury Strangers live; after hearing Transfixiation, I’m not sure I’d survive the experience. Part of me wonders that, if I did, once I staggered, blood dripping steadily from my eardrums and my head full of darkness and fear and ruin, back out onto the street, maybe some new facet of the world I’d never fully recognized might suddenly reveal itself to me. Or, on the other hand, I might just pass out in the gutter, sobbing uncontrollably and unable to remember what all had happened. Still, it’s damned tempting to give it a try…
After four long years, it’s here at last. Seriously, since the first time I heard Quiet Company’s We Are All Where We Belong, I feel like I’ve been holding my breath to see what comes next. Of course, that doesn’t mean the band’s been sitting still the whole time — far from it, in fact…
Michael Sweet is busier now than he’s ever been. After Stryper released No More Hell to Pay, arguably their best album, in November 2013, Sweet released a long-awaited solo album last year, and now this collaboration with George Lynch. Stryper have also reportedly started working on their follow-up to No More Hell to Pay. Like I said, busy…
Time sometimes mellows a musician, and in a lot of instances, that can be a very, very bad thing. On Another Mutation, though, a little bit of mellowing and stepping backwards helps, allowing singer/multi-instrumentalist Mlee Marie’s clear, beautiful voice to shine through without some of the more experimental/noisy trappings of her early work cluttering things up. And once that happens, another thing immediately snaps into focus: she’s truly one hell of a songwriter…
You can’t resist The Suffers; seriously, it’s impossible. Their music is just so infectious, so warm and mellow it’s like one of those rare perfect spring days when the sky’s bright and blue and cloudless, the weather’s warm but not yet hot, and all feels right with the world…
Wow; talk about ambition. I knew the four guys in The Lotus Effect had pretty lofty aspirations for their long-awaited full-length album, but I wasn’t real clear what they had in mind, specifically. Now that I’ve heard the full scope of Totality…well, I’m back to “wow,” again…
“How much is enough?” That seems to be the question Conroe-dwelling singer/songwriter Shellee Coley’s trying to answer with her latest album, Songs Without Bridges. I mean, you write a song on just a guitar or piano or what-have-you, and maybe you go into a studio and flesh it out with a full band, drums, bass, strings…
You’ve got to love those Linus Pauling Quartet guys; just when you think they can’t possibly come up with something quirkier or cooler or more insane than the last crazy-ass thing they did…well, they pretty much do. With big, goofy, halfway-loaded grins on their faces, no less…
It’s taken me a good long while to write this review. And until now, I wasn’t really sure why; after all, there are very few albums I’ve been more excited to hear than The Tontons’ long-awaited full-length, Make Out King and Other Stories of Love. So when I finally had a chance to check it out, I grabbed it, and listened…
It’s always nice when you see your high expectations for something get validated; that’s the way I feel about the brand-new split-7″ from two of my favorite damn bands from this great state or any other, The Ex-Optimists and A Sundae Drive. When I first got word that this was underway, I was a little bemused — the two didn’t seem to necessarily fit all that well together…
Okay, so I need to listen to Jason (Smith, that is, fellow SCR writer and badass rock photographer) more often. Don’t get me wrong; I love the guy dearly, but we don’t always see eye-to-eye on things, even when it comes to music. Lately, though, he’s been batting a thousand, and after finally getting off my ass to listen to Royal Blood and now Temples, both bands…
Even if you don’t know who Paul Collins is, trust me, you know him. You may not realize it, no, but if you’ve heard any kind of guitar-heavy pop-rock made in the last 30 years or so, odds are good that there’s at least a little bit of his influence floating around in there; the man’s a real-live godfather of American-made power-pop, and he laid down the blueprint…
Oh, damn. I very nearly let this one slip by — we do get a crapload of releases sent our way, you know, and a large percentage of ’em suck — but now I’m so, so glad I didn’t. Why? Well, because I’m pretty sure I’ve just heard my New Favorite Rock Band, at least for this year, and you need to, too. Royal Blood are from Brighton, on the southern coast of England, but on their self-titled debut album, you wouldn’t know it…
If you’d ever wondered if there’s a middle ground between surf-rock, shoegaze, Latino pop, and Afrobeat, well, wonder no more, because on their debut EP, Love Grows, Houston’s Deep Cuts have found it and planted their flag deep, deep in the sand. The quintet somehow manages to blend together Latin-tinged pop, wavery dream-pop guitars…
A couple guitars, a bass, drums, distortion pedals, some riffs, and half-crazed snarled/yelped vocals — honestly, do you really need anything else? No; no, you most definitely do not. MODFAG prove the case here with their debut full-length, Paradisio, which is banged together from the elements above and not a damn thing else and which rocks the fucking doors off…
These days, it seems, Keeton Coffman’s a changed man. When I first ran across Coffman, he was the frontman for The 71’s, a well-respected alt-/indie-rock outfit, and I was a bit bemused, I’ll admit — live, he was so wild and bombastic and over-the-top that it seemed almost put on, like a persona he was wearing, That Crazy Rock Guy, complete with overblown stage antics. I liked the music, definitely…
There’s a darkness to America, to our history. It’s a stark, surprising contrast to a lot of our country’s accepted story, because we’ve managed to brand ourselves as this great, shining city on a hill, something other countries should aspire to emulate, to be…
I used to obsess about lyrics. I methodically scrawled them across every surface I could find, particularly high school book covers; I was sure those words were this magical key that could help me unlock the frustrating, perplexing mysteries of the world. Obviously, that didn’t happen, but even now I can recite the lyrics to any pre-Black Album Metallica…
Well, now. Six years after their debut, Digital Nozzle, and long after I’d figured the duo (Stefan Mach and Jordan Brady) had gone their separate ways (and yeah, it sounds like they had, at least in the physical sense), Lisa’s Sons are finally back with the followup…
Somewhere in the not-too-distant now, aliens will/are/have invaded the world via a meteor landing in continental Europe. Aliens with the ability to replay periods of time (roughly 24-48 hours) over and over again, making them largely invincible. Or at least they were, until press officer William Cage (Tom Cruise) finds himself an unlikely front-line soldier…
Funeral Horse frontman/guitarist Paul Bearer, aka Paul Chavez, aka Walter Carlos, is something of an enigma to me. I’ve met the guy a few times over the years, live and electronically, and each time he’s been doing something seemingly completely different, sometimes using a different name, and every damn one of those things has been pretty great. First there was the sadly-overlooked art-punk/New Wave trio Art Institute; then came along sleazy, gritty gutterpunks…
