Sometimes dorks really do make the best music. Something about the goofy Buddy Holly-esque glasses, shaggy hair, and lankiness combines to create music that is clever, catchy, and not completely devoid of lyrical merit. Built By Snow may strike the average appreciator of music as just another indie-rock band…
Music bloggers love to compare The Besnard Lakes to the Beach Boys. It’s true; try navigating your way through the webosphere to find a blog and/or zine that doesn’t — they’re not there. And yes, this six-piece indie outfit from Montreal has clearly taken some harmonic cues from the ’60s…
I’ve been looking forward to this one for a while now, but now that I’ve got it in hand and am listening to it, I’m torn. Don’t get me wrong — I’m enjoying the heck out of While You Were Gone’s new EP and kicking myself for not yet having seen them play live. Vocalist/pianist Misty Gray’s got one of the best voices…
In Used Alien Mind’s second album The Placement Aside, Mike Leporte’s one-man-show once again plays space lounge sound to perfection. With all the subtle blips and lo-fi burps and cosmic nuance, the work offers eclectic musicality. “Splashes of Color” sounds like robots building other robots…
In general, I’ve tried to make a habit of keeping a bit of critical distance from bands that make their living by digging up the musical past. Sure, I enjoy the hell out of bands like The Redwalls or The Darkness in part because of the fact that they mine styles that evoke a certain era…
Mike Miller says in his bio that he sounds like “They Might Be Giants, Biz Markie, The Rentals, and Atom and his Package, with a punk edge…and please don’t say Weird Al.” Well, sorry, Mr. Miller, you kind of forced my hand, after listening to Complete Buffoonery. You sound like Weird Al…
There are some bands that attract fans by the ferocity of their music alone. They make sure that every kick, every hit of the tom, every bass note rumbles, making itself known and felt. Whether a song is awesome or awful is irrelevant. Luckily, the King Hen is not one of those bands…
Wow, this is different. Upon listening to The Forms self-titled second CD (the follow-up to Icarus, released in 2004), I had to go on the Web to find video of The Forms and see how they were producing those sounds. The Forms play fairly quiet, smooth, atmospheric music…
Southern rock need not be ridden to compilation albums sold on TV in the wee hours of the night. ASG has got the goods and has pushed the genre enough to show real ingenuity. With their fourth album, Win Us Over, the band from North Carolina delivers tracks…
The thing about writing songs that speak to the darker parts of our soul is the delicate balance of writing songs that are sentimental without being prosaic and annoyingly emo. It takes a truly talented and self-aware musician to construct lyrical poetry that is reflective without taking itself too seriously…
Supergroup/Side Project Warning: The Playing Favorites are a group of indie musicians who have been or are in bands such as Lagwagon, Sugarcult, Penfifteen Club, Bad Astronaut, and The Rentals, just to name a few. After a late night out, Joey Cape and Luke Tierney, who were on tour together…
If you haven’t heard of these guys, go ahead and put them on your short list of new favorite bands. The Casket Lottery and Small Brown Bike are both gone, but because of their chemistry in past collaborative efforts, ex-band members Nathan Ellis, Ben Reed, Mike Reed, and Jeff Gensterblum are creating amazing music together […]
I can’t claim have a lot of knowledge about Houston punk rock. I used to frequent hardcore shows, I know who the Fatal Flying Guilloteens are, and I know who 30footFALL is. Beyond that, bands like Plastic Idols are pretty unknown to me. They were around before I was born, and they lasted until I was 2 or 3…
Local progressive rock icon Doug Pinnick is at it again, having completed a new solo project recorded at Blacksound Studios in Los Angeles, Strum Sum Up. The famed bassist and lead vocalist for King’s X has teamed up with fellow Houstonian Walter “Wally” Farkas, formerly of Galactic Cowboys…
Patient Patient’s first album, Professionals and Convicts, is a quality album, full of hard-boiled, determined tracks. This group from Bellingham, Washington, has crafted a powerful and balanced piece with form more mature than usually seen in a first release…
Don’t be fooled by the title; on their latest live CD (the most recent of five), iconic California pop-punkers NOFX sound better — tighter, faster, smarter — than they have in a while. It’s probably because these guys really do shine live, where they can bounce shit off the audience…
Sweet Jesus. I’m having a real hard time digesting the fact that Quantum Fucking is now officially the Fatal Flying Guilloteens’ tenth release. I was almost positive the ground would open up and swallow the band whole before the universe would allow that much Guilloteens-ness to exist…
Nothing short of “amazing” should be used to sum up the newest addition to the Bloodsimple world. With it being over two years since their first debut album, A Cruel World, the now-four-member crew has proven their place in the metal scene with the follow-up album Red Harvest…
On their self-titled EP, Houston band Balero plays instrumental heavy metal. One of the biggest things that annoys me about metal is the singing, so these guys are already more up my alley than most current metal bands. And hey, Slint used death-metal pedals and nobody complained…
The boys in A>S>H>S have been grooving around Houston for about a decade now, recently releasing their first album Audible Stellar Hypnotic Situations. Their instrumental sound has an electronic/jazzy/funk feel to it, peppered with turntables and saxophones…
DC-based band Le Loup includes eight musicians, (or, “a collective of talented young artists and entrepreneurs,” according to their Website) who have collaborated to create The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly…
You know, if Firebug had spent less time on fancy packaging and boastful self-reviews, they might have actually found the time to write the amazing songs they claim to. The reality is that they came out with half-assed, clichéd pseudo-rock and roll…
Neaderthal is the latest release from Wisconsin’s self-proclaimed “Arena Geek-Rock” trio Sunspot. Their fourth album promises to be a blend of Weezer and American power-pop pioneers Cheap Trick, but Neanderthal can’t live up to its promises…
It’s kind of hard to take Schoolyard Heroes seriously. They want to be scary; they want to be “horror” music, but I think they’re missing their mark. They’re more like, say, Scream than The Devil’s Rejects…
From the first note of Pancho Fantastico, it’s immediately obvious that John Hoskinson has a knack for writing catchy melodies and tight instrumentation. Unfortunately, these characteristics prove to be the album’s downfall. The opener, “Miss Rejection,” is plenty loaded with charming hooks and super saccharine…
Dimestore Dandelion’s newest EP, Oil and Water, is tricky for me to review. Ultimately, I wish it had been sent to someone else. In reading the little snippet describing the band and record, it seemed the sound would be different — something more lo-fi and homey, I guess. But that doesn’t matter…
While I was apparently sleeping, it seems Houston’s garage-punk underground has been busy. On top of the bands I’ve already been blown away by, like Something Fierce, the Monocles, Teenage Kicks, Born Liars, and Ragged Hearts, now here comes Deathbed Repentance…
The theme from “New York, New York” couldn’t possibly be the same old cornball, oft-played cliché, could it? The drum intro, “boom-boom-SHACK da-boom-boom-SHACK,” drags you right up to the doorstep of “Start spreading the news…” Cat Power’s Chan Marshall conjures up a spirit and a vibe…
The male solo musician falls into one of two categories, generally. He’s either ripping off Bright Eyes and Elliott Smith or he’s backed by bored synthesizers or a bored acoustic guitar. Singer Eldridge Rodriguez successfully avoids both traps on his new album, This Conspiracy Against Us…
The demon is loose behind me right now, blasting its way into my ear cavities. The three-headed demon led by Scott Pinkmountain-Rosenberg (I’m not sure which surname he’s sticking with at this point). If Fingerprints, Medicine is, in fact, the result of a veteran jazz saxophonist throwing down the sax…
Consider this truth: Liars has produced a solid new album. With three respectable records and a national tour with indie favorites Interpol behind them, Liars’ should be prepared to greet new and old fans and much well-deserved attention. Liars is a haunting unraveling…
From out of the wilds of Deer Park, Texas, comes…well, the biggest surprise I got this past holiday season, at least. On their self-titled debut EP, these three young guys initially come off like shaggy-haired, countrified cousins to the whole garage-rock crew, bands like The Datsuns, The Hives, The Von Bondies…
I can tell you that I, at least, didn’t see it coming. I mean, who’d have thought that from what was once the biggest rock trio in the world, the member who’d go on to the most enduring, maybe even most influential rock stardom would be…the drummer? The hell?…
Seattle group Denelian is making music that somehow has elements of ’80s-retro, garage, and euro-inflicted dance music, but it’s fun and energetic. Their August 2007 Demo CD-R contains three self-recorded songs that’re of decent enough quality, although the levels do clash at times…
Do you remember being a little kid and listening to tapes (how ancient is that?) in the car that taught you the alphabet or all fifty states and stuff like that? And how it was really cheesy-sounding music that was probably programmed on a Casiotone…
Why do I keep doing this to myself with this band? I’d enjoyed what I’d heard of Saves The Day’s older stuff, so when Stay What You Are came out, I picked it up, mostly on the strength of “At Your Funeral”…and promptly discovered that the rest of the album was just “eh,” at best…
Phame is a rapper from San Francisco. His delivery is dense and staccato — he squeezes lots of words into each phrase, and each syllable is precisely placed. While the rhythm of the words sounds spontaneous, however, his delivery of the words themselves can be limited — he raps them all the same way, which ends up sounding a little flat…
Okay, so I’ve put off listening to Papermoons self-titled debut 7″ for a little while now. I could be scrupulously honest and talk about how I’m a lazy ass who forgets things, or wax poetic about how having a kid and no longer having the space/time to review stuff…
I had the pleasure of hearing Crosby Loggins open for Joe Bonamassa at the Stafford Centre in the Houston area back in October 2007. That pleasure was only further enhanced by my first spin of his debut CD, We All Go Home…
Boy, did this CD get into the right hands! From what I’ve heard and read, I’m super impressed with the band Japanther from Brooklyn — they’ve played shows at art studios, put on punk rock operas with big puppets, played on a floating platform at a giant indoor pool, and just put on some crazy shows at more typical club venues…
