I looked forward to giving another mindless modern rock band a literary ax-hug. I wanted to hate this album. I really did. But I just can’t. The only way to describe this album is as if the garbage that’s currently rotting in the airwaves wasn’t garbage…
Don’t let the cover of the Clash’s “White Riot” tacked on at the end of this album fool you; Room 101 is a far cry from ’70s-style punk. In recorded form, at least, self-described one-man-band Roburt Reynolds’ Room 101 project owes a hell of a lot more from late-’80s NYC noise-rock…
Race Bannon was the loyal “partner” to the unmarried Dr. Quest from the Adventures of Johnny Quest, but namesake band Racebannon is an Indiana band that has more mood swings than Britney Spears…
Reinvention is a bitch. I’m guessing the guys in Richmond, TX’s Mechanical Boy have been finding that out the past year or three. When last we saw (er, heard) the band, on their self-titled EP from a handful of years back, they were full-on members…
The music on Forgot About the Whistle Industry starts promisingly, with distant, Radiohead-ish guitar and funky drums, but man, when guitarist/vocalist Jeremy Vanecek starts singing…it’s all downhill from there. It’s not the voice, mind you, but the words Vanecek’s singing that make me cringe…
There’s something warm and genuine-sounding about this disc that really gets me in those interior spaces I don’t think about too much most of the time. I mean, it’s hard to mine the roots-rock thing and not throw off a Mellencampian, small-town-homesick vibe…
My, how the mighty have risen. I remember seeing Flight of the Conchords at SXSW way back in 2006 and thinking to myself, “why am I the only one here?” Because there was literally almost no one at their shows…
Horns. That’s what been missing from my life. Well, horns and chicka-chicka guitars, anyway. And maybe some Hammond organ…
Recorded as a four-piece at Dead City Sound, This Year’s Tiger’s self-titled EP demonstrates that they’re a band Houston should be proud of. Even scaled-down to a three-piece live, they’re both raw and powerful, and this sound translates well to disc…
There’s not a whole lot groundbreaking on Rhythm Amongst the Chaos, but really, I don’t really mind. There’s something in the band’s tried-and-true brand of thrashcore that gets the blood pumping, even when I know full well I’ve heard this a million times before…
Improvised (or even improvised-sounding) music makes my skin crawl. Okay, so that’s a bit of an exaggeration — I don’t really find it creepy, per se, but it just kind of irks me, in the same way that, say, driving around town aimlessly or running in circles irks me…
In a weird way, I wouldn’t be here without Sprawl. No, I’m not going to spin some sappy-yet-strange story about being conceived while my parents listened to The Man With The Yellow Hat — I’m nowhere near that young, and sadly, my parents are nowhere near that cool…
What the hell happened here? Granted, it’s been a while since I checked in with the band, but the last time I checked, Reggie and the Full Effect was a whip-smart, self-referencing, sarcastic-ier-than-thou cold shower of a “project” that didn’t take itself (or the music it appropriated) at all seriously…
I loved this CD from the first time I shoved it into the player. San Antonio’s The Panic Division hooks you right away with a massive familiarity that you can’t quite put your finger on…
I wasn’t sure how I would feel after listening through At Mount Zoomer, but I wasn’t expecting to be pleased. Maybe I’m too pessimistic, but sophomore albums have let me down enough that I’ve come to fear and almost expect the “sophomore slump”…
Hopeless/Sub City Records have decided to audibly bash, melodically sweep, and musically cock its feathers with their latest jaw-dropping punk rock compilation, Take Action 7. With yet another stunning lineup that includes the likes of All Time Low and radio darlings The Spill Canvas…
Vacation Bible School makes nihilism sound fun. For whatever reason, the best (and the happiest) songs are the ones about life being meaningless. On their Unlucky EP, they sing about other subjects, but nihilism inspires their best work…
Formerly known as Harrydash, the newly named Tenspoke Indies released their debut album, Blinded By The Sound, in March of 2008. With a music makeover to go with the name change, I expected a lot from this charming quartet from Tampa, Florida…
Roedelius/Story is a side project of Cluster’s Hans-Joachim Roedelius, who’s been collaborating with Tim Story, an American synthesizer experimentalist and composer. Their third album, Inlandish, combines classical-sounding keyboard parts…
A friend of mine tried to convince me once that creating good pop music is practically science. Not that you have to do A, B, and C to make a perfect pop song, but more that there are things you just don’t do if you want it to work right…
Mötley Crüe is a brand, like Apple or Harley Davidson. Like the biggest bands in the last fifty years, Mötley Crüe exists in our minds as part of a universal consciousness, a shared history. If you are between the ages of thirty and maybe forty-five…
Dark with lots of electronic layers, I initially had a difficult time getting to know Help Wanted, the initial offering from former Jane’s Addiction bassist and founding member Eric Avery. After several attempts and an accidental shady parking garage…
In a musical landscape where record reviews tend to devolve into name-checking, genre-hyphenating, deconstructionist vacuums, it’s refreshing to get the chance to review a record where this is practically impossible. Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea is just such a record…
I popped this shit in my CD player and genuinely knew within the first 30 seconds that this would not be a one-and-done listening. Not that I knew I was going to love it — rather, that it was going to be one of those CDs…
There is something to be said about a band who unabashedly embraces their roots and in so doing makes music that appeals to an almost singular set of people who come from the same place…
An interesting coincidence happened to me the second time I listened to the Seximals’ latest album Small Songs. Right as track five began playing in my car stereo, I noticed in my rearview mirror that a group of motorcyclists had pulled up behind me…
Hype up the ying-yang with these guys. Pitchfork, NME, Rolling Stone — they all love Fleet Foxes. I saw these guys live in a little club in S.F. about a couple months before they hype machine really took off…
We’ve been hearing it since we were children — “don’t judge a book by its cover,” meaning, don’t make hasty assumptions based on superficial impressions. This is the exact mistake I made with The Dreadful Yawns, forgetting these elementary words of wisdom…
After a few listens to Fort Music, you realize the Dead Trees wear their influences on their sleeve. The album sounds as though it was recorded in a basement, but worse still, the band never really comes up with a solid sound of their own…
The Six Songs EP offers another jolt of what the Brokedowns gave us on their second album, New Brains for Everyone: fast-paced, energetic, Midwestern punk rock. It was also amusing to note that the press kit for this one was exactly 4 lines…
Pushing Red Buttons’ Foreign Film or Tango Dance? sounds like nothing so much as a lost Mike Patton project, or possibly a series of unreleased demos from Soul Asylum. All the best aspects of ’90s alternative music are presented to the listener…
All the clever things I wanted to say about Nil Recurring by Porcupine Tree ended up not being quite as clever as I thought. So I’ll keep it simple. Porcupine Tree is one of the most exciting bands out there right now, and the amazing thing is that they’ve been around for almost 20 years…
It’s a problem of expectations. When I first heard M83’s Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts, I was blown away. I fell in love with Anthony Gonzalez and Nicolas Fromageau’s primary-color-shaded walls of melodic, ethereal-yet-visceral noise…
Damn, this album makes me want to hit the secondhand record store & dig out some Animals, Rolling Stones, and Byrds albums. And no, I don’t mean that as a slam, some way to say that Seattle duo The Dutchess & the Duke…
The May Fire’s six-song EP, The List, rubbed me the wrong way initially, I’ll admit it. After a few more listens, though, I’m slowly warming to the band. It wasn’t the music that threw me off, really — The List is pretty much straight-ahead, indie-tinged rock…
Roll up your sleeves and dig on this wack Explosions In the Sky cover band. On the one hand, all this fancy guitar noodling is hard to dismiss — then, on the other hand, I feel like I should be watching Friday Night Lights…
Normally I can’t stand it when bands use polysyllabic words too much, but The Velocet pulls it off on A Quick and Dirty Guide to War. They use words like “circumstance” and “coronation” without even rhyming them…
SCR‘s own Scott Whitt lukewarmly reviewed sputnik Monroe’s first effort, Wake the Sleeping Giant, back in 2007. In that review, his major criticisms seemed to be that Sputnik Monroe failed to live up to the experimental fusion of Muse and Mars Volta that they claimed to be…
That Darren Keen, he’s a wily one. Hailing from Omaha, NE, by way of Lincoln, Keen seems like the only act in Omaha not on Saddle Creek, and he is doing his damndest to make sure you don’t mistake him…
Yeah, I’ve been wrestling with this one for a while. It’s surprisingly hard to peg down a band when they remind you of a period in music rather than of any specific band or bands, and that’s the case for me with The Jealous Girlfriends on their self-titled full-length…
