Hair: Chicago Punk Cuts, as you would expect from the title, compiles fourteen unreleased songs by different Chicago punk bands, spanning the range of punk and hardcore. From Explode and Make Up’s ’90s pop-punk, to The Killing Tree’s hardcore thrash…
The Slits are back! After making us wait for 25 years, they’ve rewarded our patience with a new record. The Slits’ new EP,Revenge of the Killer Slits, shows them in fine form. With two new songs and one unreleased old one…
I recently watched Martin Scorsese’s fascinating, very nearly illuminating Bob Dylan documentary No Direction Home, and between the clips of British fans denouncing him, the chaotic and mythical Newport Folk Festival performance…
Within seconds of hitting the Play button, Elevator Action has the hook: thick guitars and good melodies with grit and crunch. “Surely You Know,” the lead-off on the band’s new album, Society, Secret, has a quivering vocal which is quite Bowie-esque…
Over the years, musicians have collaborated to bring their listeners fresh new sounds with an edge. The first time I ever remember such a commingling of musical genres was back in the ’80s, when Run DMC and Aerosmith brought us their rapping/rocked-out version…
About the band’s new album, Phantasmagore, Deadsy frontman Elijah Blue says, “We just wanted to make a rock record in the spirit of [Lou Reed’s] Transformer.” Sorry Mr. Blue — not even close…
Cheer-Accident is a long-running Chicago band that’s known for complicated, intense music which embraces a wide range of abrasive sounds. What Sequel?, however, is not like most of their records, in that it’s made up of relatively ordinary pop songs…
Post-punk, aka electro-punk, aka avant-garde rock. Who the hell is Les Georges Leningrad (not to be confused with the notorious gypsy punk band from Russia, Leningrad), and what the hell are they doing to my headphones?…
After being subjected to wave after wave of pseudo new wave/indie rock/’80s inspired (Note: As I am sure half of said bands were barely born in the ’80s, I feel compelled to inform you that this reference to the ’80s sound is merely a reference point…)
Since the invention of recorded music, engineers have struggled with the challenge of hearing the sound of a band playing in a room and replicating it using only small paper cones. No artist exemplifies this challenge better than Athens duo Jucifer…
As huge of a Superchunk fan as I am, I’ve never really jumped on the Portastatic bandwagon. (Obligatory explanatory digression: Portastatic is the side-project of Superchunk frontman Mac McCaughan. We now return you to the review, already in progress)…
Griddle has the potential to completely rock out, as the band demonstrates on the first track of Klimty Favela, “City Made of Teeth.” Starting out with a dark, indie-rock sound, the song quickly erupts with ridiculous falsetto vocals…
Mark Doyon, the sole force behind Arms of Kismet, describes his new album, Cutting Room Rug, as a jigsaw puzzle. “Sometimes the puzzle falls off the table,” he says. “You can put it back together, or you can do something else with the pieces”…
Firstly: Wolf Eyes should be commended for their brevity. In the world of noise music, where the 80-minute capacity of the CD is often mistaken for the ideal run time, it’s great to have an album that clocks in at a sprightly 33 minutes and change…
Over the years, the definition of “pop music” has changed dramatically in my eyes. For a long time, I genuinely believed that announcing that pop music was your primary music drug of choice made you appear to have no taste in music whatsoever…
Take a listen to Alexisonfire. No, not “Alex-is-on-fire”; the band’s name is Alexis-on-fire, taken from the world’s only lactating contortionist. And yes, you should be able to milk their new album for a few good tunes. I haven’t heard any of the albums before the band’s latest…
I’ve tried to write reviews for both of these discs, Anti-Flag’s For Blood and Empire and Strike Anywhere’s Dead FM, for a while now, and it just hasn’t worked. I keep finding myself viewing them both together, rather than separately…
“Produced by J. Robbins.” At this point in the indie-rock game, you can almost guess what a band’s going to sound like just from that one sentence fragment. That’s not a dig at either Robbins or the bands he’s produced — he’s produced and played on some of my favorite records…
It’s always been my sincere belief that Music can work as a unifying medium that brings two or more opposing forces together in harmony, even if said unification is temporary. With the world changing in rapid and unsettling ways…
The last time I heard Aloha (prior to listening to their newest album, Some Echoes), I was making my babygirl a mix-tape and I pulled out Sugar, from like 2002. I scanned through it, however, and realized that all of the songs sounded the same to me and none were comp-worthy…
Klunk, Motor’s first release, is brought to you by French drummer Mr. No and Minnesota native Bryan Black. They apparently met when Black watched one of Mr. No’s shows and became fast friends because of their mutual love of Prince…
Though the dog days of summer are past, there’s a certain musical reddening still available to us — the Wiggins’ Greatest Apes EP is a summer record in the best of ways: it’s loud, euphoric, and indifferent to taste…
A good indication of whether I like an album or not is whether I choose to listen to it outside of my reviewing duties. Many a reviewed album gets spun only a few times, then relegated to a pile that reminds you that “getting to keep what you review”…
I’ve been hearing a lot of noise about grindcore lately, and I have to say that there’s nothing wrong with the genre; if you like screaming and guitars that sound like grinding metal, then it’s gravy. Jeff Walker pioneered the genre with his band Carcass…
((sounder))’s There is another sun clouded over with meticulous care is jammy, drone-y, and long. It drags in the middle under its own ponderous weight. The album and song titles are cumbersome, and most of the songs could be cut…
I can remember that the first time I came across Samiam, back in the early ’90s, they were labeled a punk band, and the tag threw me off right from the start. For one thing, vocalist Jason Beebout actually sang, something I honestly didn’t expect…
After 2003’s Something to Crow About demonstrated their balls, charm, attitude, and sense of humor, Denton’s Riverboat Gamblers were poised to become one of the country’s best garage-punk bands. Instead, they chose to move to Austin…
Is this the state of punk? I hope not. Pretty Flowers’ three-song EP has all of the romantic trappings of old-school punk but none of the guts. It’s as if the band knew they should include every attribute of the best punk albums of the late ’70s…
There is nothing flashy about Cale Parks, but he makes geek look good. In between albums for the indie band Aloha, Parks decided to take it upon himself to release his first full-length debut, Illuminated Manuscripts…
Okay, so I hate giving bad reviews for anything, but I’m going to be honest here because I believe that’s my duty as a reviewer: Millionaire’s latest EP, Paradisiac, is not good. I’m not going to use any inappropriate words…
This is the self-titled debut album for Vancouver-area band Ladyhawk, and it starts off slow. Not slow in tempo, but slow in terms of quality. The first full three songs (“48 Hours,” “The Dugout,” and “My Old Jacknife”), unfortunately, are indie-rock clichés…
J Dilla’s album The Shining was released after he passed away from lupus, completed by his friend Karriem Riggins after J was gone. Needless to say, the rappers that performed on the record perform with obvious love for J Dilla…
This album should come with a sticker: “Only play loud.” Played in the background, Comets on Fire’s Avatar sounds like a melange of various psychedelic bands, with a potpourri of Blue Cheer, a sprinkling of 13th Floor Elevators…
There is something to be said for the freedom that comes with doing music for yourself. There is a luxury a band out working for a label will never have, the ability to create a picture much like the individuals who make up the band…
On their second EP, UFO Stories, Forest Giants lure you in with a simple and very narcotic musical recipe. Nothing is overdone, nothing is forced, and the end result sounds like they just put a microphone up in their living room…
There was a time when Las Vegas lounge music was taken seriously — back then, the immortal Rat Pack took audiences by storm and reigned supreme, and even their lounge singer hangers-on got some respect. Then along came Saturday Night Live…
If this single for “INRI” is any indication of who The Plot to Blow up the Eiffel Tower is, and if this is an example of what Art Fag records is going to put out, then I am confident in saying that nobody is going to care about either…
The Pat McGee Band’s latest album, Save Me, plays like a real rock n’ roll album should. It goes right in the CD player, spins around really fast, and some kind of laser picks up some kind of digital information, and…other stuff happens…
On Heavy Hands, Ladyfinger (ne) borrows from the last 30 years or so of heavy metal. Singer Chris Machmuller sounds like a cross between Robert Plant and Perry Farrell (which should also result in an ego large enough to damage small European countries)…
I’ve found my new guilty pleasure. An album saturated with so much indie-pop goodness it makes your tummy hurt from the sweetness. Kid Theodore’s seven-song debut EP, goodnight…goodnight, is a pop lover’s dream…
