festival/sunflwr, the new twenty-three minute (plus!) CD from the Riff Tiffs, opens with eloquence and grace. Starting with an undercurrent of drums and slow-motion guitar textures, “Festival” creeps up as everything builds into crashing eruptions…
It seems like everyone wants to be Muse these days. Well, there are worse bands you could emulate. Unlike Muse, however, Love & Sabotage by The Oswald Effect rarely worships at any other altar than that of the god of energetically empty political pretension…
Remember the days (quick caveat: I don’t remember these days, but I think I’m right about this; at least Wikipedia tells me I am) when making music that sounded like how a venue looked was interesting? Those days in the mid-’70s when great musicians were all hanging out together…
I have been sitting on this review for many months, really unable to get my head around Flesh and Spirits, the third album from The Gena Rowlands Band, an ever-shifting project centered on…
Gallhammer is an all-girl black metal band from Tokyo patterned after Hellhammer and its psuedo-successor Celtic Frost. If that sentence alone does not make you at least check out their Myspace…
I’ve got to be honest, here — much as I wanted to, I just didn’t like Hollywood Black’s debut, Two Thousand Years Of Progress, all that much. It had the right parts in most of the right places, sure, but taken as a whole it felt petulant and immature…
Today is a confusing day for me. I swear I spent eight hours at work, but it felt like I was in the waiting room of my dentist’s office. You know the ambience: old musty couches, lamps from the 1970s, and copies of Highlights intermingled issues of Cosmo…
A band’s physical album is often an exercise in the art of presentation. Even major label releases with all the money of Midas behind them are often bargain-basement CD cases and booklets little removed from the practical paper sleeve. Why waste money on pictures and lyrics, right?…
Sunny Day Sets Fire plays with a colorful sound palette derived from their respective places of origin: Sardinia, Hong Kong, Italy, Canada, and London. If only our little world was as harmonious as this quintet…
On their debut full-length, Call It Off, Speaker Speaker continue down the path they took on their We Won’t March EP. They still like the stripped-down force of the guitar/bass/drums trio, but they expand their palette with harmonica, glockenspiel, and lots of harmonies…
Lust, Lust, Lust walks you into a distorted world filled with love, sex, desire, and sin. Stripping away the more garage-rock sound of The Raveonettes’ last album, Pretty in Black, Sune Rose Wagner anchors his sound with feedback as ’50s guitar hooks circle…
Three piece Danish neo-Punk outfit Plök’s first American release, You Tie a Rock to Your Leg Cuz it Fits You, sounds familiar. “Familiar” in that it sounds derivative. “Derivative” in that it sounds stolen. Stolen from something circa Warped Tour 2002…
Inventing Stars, by pArAdOx OnE (also known as Phil Jackson), is one of those albums that you have playing while doing other things. Things like driving, household chores, and general life things that are typically empty without the sound of something musical…
From the first listen of this CD, it was like meeting someone that you know you’re gonna get along well with. Jon McKiel is another Canadian import and has recently released the CD The Nature of Things, a follow-up to his debut self-titled 2006 disc…
Some days, it can be damn difficult to pin down a band that doesn’t fit in any kind of neat scenesterized box. What are you, if you’re not nu-New Wave, screamo, post-punk, metalcore, or space-rock? Just guitars and drums and a voice — what the hell’s that, these days?…
There’s a certain type of music that, even upon first listen, makes you miss someone; or, maybe more appropriately, makes you miss a feeling. It’s hard to explain, really, but we all know this type of music — songs that touch the nerve of emotion that gets you…
Synchronicity, when it happens, can be a truly beautiful thing. I’ve been stuck in House-Moving Hell for the past month or so, with all my crap boxed and bagged and sitting in one garage or another, and in the process of packing the ridiculous stacks of books in the back of the house…
The Pleasures of Merely Circulating are from Marfa. If that doesn’t ring a bell, it’s a town of about 2500 near Big Bend. Far from being one of the innumerable backwards hamlets that litter East, West, North, South, and Central Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas…
Strong bass lines and solid chord structure musically define Poisonous Times, the third release from Olympia, Washington, act The Old Haunts. It’s evident that this garage-rock band won’t have to work late-late nights to keep on the lights…
Normal Love’s musical lineup is basically your standard rock group, but their music is anything but. On their debut album, Normal Love, they play completely composed music. The music sounds like Ruins playing Anthony Braxton-style jazz or maybe 20th century classical music…
The Grand Archives is the latest project from Mat Brooke (Band of Horses, Carissa’s Wierd). The Archives’ self-titled debut prides itself on being light-hearted and uplifting, and indeed, it’s the audio equivalent of a sunny, cloudless day…
Noise music is a genre rooted in experimentation. Songs that fly past conventional lengths, guitars played in strange tunings just to see what sounds they yield, volume levels turned up just to see how loud they can go — you get the picture. But all of these ideas come within a frame…
About halfway through this album, I came to the conclusion that it must be a joke. I certainly hope this wasn’t a serious musical venture. I advise The Dagger Brothers to return the Casios they used for both the drum and the synth tones for the album to the 1980s yard sale…
The first time through Let Me Live, the second album by Salt Lake City’s Band of Annuals, I wasn’t blown away. Nowhere close, in fact. It felt slow, a little dull, nearly sleepy at points. I just shrugged and turned off the CD, moving on to other things…
This album brings out a lot of mixed feelings in me. I really like some of it, but then the bad parts are just too bad to let go. The first track, “Between Tangled Wire & Sand Bags,” was really sweet; it reminded me a lot of Deloused-era Volta or Volcano!…
Despite being around for eight years already, Swedish metal band Scarpoint has finally released their debut full-length, The Silence We Deserve. The band was started by Henrik Englund (vocals) and Zoran Kukulj (lead guitar), and with the addition of Eric Holmberg…
Dear My Milky Way Arms: thanks for totally ruining my long-time love for (post-Gary Numan, pre-Talking Heads-ish) proto-electronic music. It’s over. Forever. And it’s your fault. Your self-titled debut EP sounds like a junior varsity marriage between Holy Fuck and Hot Chip…
It’s really, really hard for me to believe that that voice comes from where it does. One of the absolute best things about Cleveland duo mr. Gnome, comprised of guitarist/vocalist Nicole Barrile and drummer Sam Meister, is Barille’s singing; frankly, it’s incredible…
It’s said that hindsight is 20/20, and as many musicians age, it often seems to be the case. Musician Scott Lucas started off angry at the Chicago suburbs on 1995’s Ham Fisted, slammed relationships and unwanted fans on 1997’s As Good As Dead…
Some people just have good yelling voices. Trust me, I know this; I went to military school. And Matt Foster, the frontman for Bay Area band First To Leave, has got the right pipes for scream-singing…
Drag the River sounds a lot like Son Volt. More precisely, imagine Jeff Tweedy breaking off to form Son Volt instead of Wilco — that’s what Drag the River sounds like, complete with poppier melodies and vaguer lyrics. The band centers on two guys who sing and write the songs…
All of the press releases, record reviews, and magazine articles that come from Seattle all say the same thing about their hometown songstress Sera Cahoone: something like, “finally our city is finding its voice and stripping itself from our once-proud grunge aesthetic”…
Cheesy guitar solos, nauseating high-octave boy vocals followed by non-sequitur lyrics and electro-manic music is what embodies spastic quartet ZibraZibra. Those things are not necessarily positive…
Honestly, Vopat’s Sometimes It Will is actually a beautiful album, and it stays surprisingly interesting for a collection of Explosions In The Sky-esque instrumental ambient-rock movements…
Mark Kozelek’s sound has become his language, the way he sets himself apart from emulation and the derivatives that seem so common these days. It typically takes three chords to recognize a song as being a Sun Kil Moon composition…
Though I can’t quite put my finger on it, there’s something about Sea Lion‘s packaging and artwork that perfectly fits the album’s sound. Kudos to artist Amee Kathryn for accomplishing (let alone even attempting) this feat…
Over the last several years, there have been a growing number of instrumental bands whose musical vision is focused on gorgeous ambient melodies, hypnotic chords, and intense musical progressions…
The early 2000s saw an influx saw a huge influx of emocore bands anxiously awaiting their chance to make it in the indie club circuit, which begs the question: do we really need one more?…
When an alternative rock band asks fans to help them climb the Clear Channel charts, that says a lot. “Clear Channel” is just one of those phrases that pulls half the crowd to the stage while the other half slips out back unnoticed…
Alright, so I knew San Francisco was weird as fuck to begin with, but apparently SF is the new insane party scene you always wished you were cool enough to be into but can really only shake your head in wonderment at…
