Everything about this record screams “Chapel Hill, North Carolina.” The patchwork-quilt cover, the humbledy-mumbledy singer, the outdated production (smells like the ’90s), the quite-unknown-guy who has accolades from hipsters…
Here’s the story: the guy (Erik Aucoin) who started the fledgling Lujo Records hired a girl whom he hadn’t met (Jocelyn Toews) on the other coast to help do PR. Eventually, the girl found greener pastures and went to work for a bigger, better known indie label…
A band of two Midwesterners creating beautifully crafted indie-pop rock has never sounded so fine. Turn Blue, consisting of multi-layered musicians Nathan Mathes and Mike Sappanen, has recently released their first full-length album…
With their new album, Way Back Home, Quebecois septet, One Night Band has released a wonderful example of modern rock steady. With consistency and professionalism, the band cops a Slackers-style way of characterizing the sympathetic lowlife…
Hyperactive hardcore that you can dance to is what fuels this San Francisco trio, and that’s exactly what they deliver. Snazzy, catchy synth beats drag you in, and rambling guitars cause you to stay. But the longer you listen to the Mall, the more and more it starts to feel…
Nic Garcia is mood music. It’s sullen, dark, and melancholy. There’re glimmers of hope and love in between the lines, between the raindrops and floods of tears. Yet there are just mere glimmers, nothing to hang your hat on. “Song One” is the languid pacesetter…
First off: hot damn, the album cover just plain freaks me out (mmm…blood). And kind of in a good way, which is a bit disturbing to me. I like it, though, because it’s a fairly hard-to-miss declaration of what’s to come…
Somewhere in the murky depths of post rock, drone, and jazz resides 24hourflu. Making music of such an experimental and progressive nature is a dangerous venture, which is compounded by the amount of music 24hourflu serves up…
You can’t always help what you like or dislike. That’s just human nature; even the über-hippest SuicideGirls-reading, LiveJournal-typing hipster can’t help but tap their feet to some of the uncoolest music on the planet, I guarantee you…
Dave “Paleo” Strackany’s debt to Neutral Milk Hotel would be far less obvious if not for his ill-advised affectation of Jeff Mangum’s (unaffected) nasal whine. Ironically, it would be far more obvious if Strackany possessed…
They say don’t judge a book by it’s cover, and you should definitely follow that advice with Say My Name…Now Say It Again by L.A.’s Million Dollar Mouth. The CD cover is a suit and tie guy driving in his convertible with a lobster in his lap…
I’d bet a psychologist would have a field day with my weird attraction to women who could probably kick my ass. I’ve always been fascinated by tough, angry, musical ladies like, say, the Distillers’ Brody Dalle, Kathleen Hanna, Kim Gordon…
I always like the start of a record. Such high hopes and, if it doesn’t completely suck, the lingering chance of redemption. There’s almost a sigh of relief when you start to get drawn in, or even hypnotized. Here, the “Death of a Tune” has that honky…
Though British psychobilly revivalists the Drugstore Cowboys tore things up on Rockabilly Rumble Deuce with their track “Game Over,” they — wait, that’s not right. Popular cover band The Drugstore Cowboys always wows the crowd at the San Antonio Continental…
The Record Plant in NYC has been the birthplace to many rock classics — Jimi Hendrix, KISS, Led Zepplin, and countless others. The question is does Scratch the Surface, the debut album from The Cringe, fall into the same category?…
It never ceases to amaze me how willing people are to shower praise on relatively mediocre bands like Isis and Red Sparrows, while deserving drone bands like Vopat go entirely unnoticed. Tell Them We Are Dead is a double-CD set…
Okay, first of all, a mea culpa to anyone who read my Thermals article and went to their show expecting the best live band on the planet. I saw their show in Austin…
After getting released from their major label obligations to BMG, Reel Big Fish have jumped back into the DIY/indie-label pond. With their first live album, Our Live Album is Better than Your Live Album, the band puts out a monstrous amount…
“Country-inspired guitar melodies with a rock element” is the only way to really describe Quiet Life’s self-titled EP. These New Englanders sing (er, mumble and yelp) and play like a few country kids trying to find a way to waste the day away…
Robin Trower might be the best guitar player of the blues that I’ve heard since I last watched my Stevie Ray Vaughan Live At Austin City Limits DVD. Without pop pretense or political messages, Living Out Of Time: Live will transport…
What happened to ’80s glam punk rock, you ask? Well, I’m going to tell you: it came back as a band called Sex Slaves. I know, I know — how could a sneering, leering, punk band with the moniker Sex Slaves be any good?…
So, when I first came across Paolo Nutini’s inaugural Live Sessions EP, I had to ask myself: does the world really need another young guy who sings like an old guy? I mean, it feels like the music world’s seen several of those…
Only listen to this record on a rainy, or at least overcast, day. Seriously: it doesn’t make sense when the sun is out. I’ve tried it, and the lyrical roundaboutness, the pretty but unremarkable musical backing…
Helmet’s sound was distinctive when they released their first record, which was both good and bad. Good because their sound was original, but bad because they sowed the seeds for nü-metal, progressive metal, and the metal revival in general…
I’m running out of space on the iPod. Therefore, I rarely put new music on it these days; for your band to get a coveted piece of my remaining 200 MB, you’d better impress me enough to click that “Import CD” button. I was ripping Transporter…
First, let me give you some context. My friend and I drove to New York last month, and that’s when I decided to do most of my CD review listening for the CDs in my current pile. As soon as I read the one-sheet that came with At Your Mercy…
Not to be confused with the Oxford Set (from Los Angeles, who rock), the Oxford Collapse (from Brooklyn) are hard to peg — but they’re good. Not as good as Pitchfork proclaims them to be, no, but they still deserve to be checked out…
The Automates Ki, in this incarnation are 40 automatons that play drums, strings, and cymbals. It’s certainly a novel approach to the one-man-band, but the question is: is it worth listening to? The answer is yes: the resulting music, at least as much due to programmer and accompanist…
This Australian quintet’s debut full-length is reputed (by them) to have been recorded in only four days, but to have taken eight months to be released, an auspiciously skewed relationship of creative fire to business sense that matches the comical unsavvy…
What’s not to like here? Crazy liner notes composed of hand-scrawled lists of the hierarchies of scents and angels (uh, kinda; I’m guessing the Church doesn’t recognize “The Grand Universe Eventuals” as members of the heavenly host), song titles like “Teapot Dome, Bitch”…
There’s a sticker on the front of Follow Your Saint that says “think: radiohead, portishead, danny elfman.” And how correct they are, sir! Opener “Toll for the Brave” starts with an oblong electro-beat that seems strangely familiar…
On Invasive Exotics, the first full-length effort from the Indian Jewelry incarnation of Tex Kerschen, Erika Thrasher, and Rodney Rodriguez’s musical experimentation (they also pop up under Swarm of Angels, NTX + Erika Thrasher, and a dozen or so other names)…
With a heavy-duty Boston punk pedigree (singer Mike McColgan used to front the Dropkick Murphys before quitting to be a firefighter, while drummer Joe Sirois used to be in the Mighty Mighty Bosstones), tough-looking guys in black t-shirts…
Allow me to name a new genre: obstacle-core. In obstacle-core, every band member comes up with a complicated part, and then they all play them at the same time. The parts interlock, maybe, sort of, but don’t really have any particular musicality…
At first listen, I didn’t care much for Brooklynites Parts & Labor’s latest album, Stay Afraid. It kicks off with a heavy dose of skronking feedback and noodly guitars and, well, pretty much keeps right on going that way…
Judging by the song “Perpetual Leather,” Blued is comprised of a bunch of cheeky buggers, but you know what? It’s cool. That song is all about making it big and being able to say, “Yeah baby, that’s right, that’s right it’s for real”…
A volatile musical adventure through interplanetary influences such as David Bowie and Radiohead, Tokyo Police Club makes their first mark on the new millennium with their new CD, A Lesson in Crime, making futuristic indie-rock…
I’ve wondered for years that what would’ve happened if My Bloody Valentine had followed up 1991’s Loveless with some further step in the evolution of overdriven, fuzzed-out shoegazer rock; now I think I know…
Anthill has been growing on me. One of the difficulties with reviewing a bunch of stuff at the same time is that it’s easy to get hooked on the album that creates the biggest splash or makes the strongest first impression. This framing effect is even stronger when the other albums are less accessible…
Just like the infamous line from Dumb and Dumber, Aspen It Is reminds me of my adolescent days spent shooting Nerf guns and dueling it out on Nintendo-64. Their album Release Me! From the Weights of Gravity deals with…
