So many of the current “punk” fans believe that “their” music started with Blink-182 and Green Day — give me a break. The Angelic Upstarts have been around since the early ’80s. And yes, that is 1980, as in “before your young ass was even hatched”…
I guess I’ve got a bit of a chip on my shoulder when it comes to “Austin music.” It’s not even the fault of the many bands and musicians who inhabit the Austin scene, but is more due to the seeming overhyping of any and every bit of music that comes out of our fair sister city…
Remember the first time you heard the Pretenders? Well, this disc reminds me of the style and vocal presence of that band. I hate having to make such comparisons, as it seems to detract from the value and originality of an artist’s work…
A twang of guilt at my perpetual tardiness in writing reviews for this here zine resulted in me putting this disc in my CD player. The result of that action was a compulsion to write this particular review right this instant, so that I don’t have to listen to this particular album ever again…
The EP before the recently-released Arrhythmia is my introduction to APC. This set of seven songs all fits under the “electronica” banner, I guess, except that about half the tracks have rappers over them. Being horribly undereducated in this field…
On the surface, these records don’t have much to do with each other, besides alphabetic proximity and the fact that they showed up in my mail box at the same time. And only a foolish reviewer would try to discuss them at the same time. Fortunately (or unfortunately) for you, I am incredibly foolish…
One-sheets are a bitch. For those of you unfamiliar with them, one-sheets communicate to the reviewer of the record the pre-digested information that the record label or band promoter wants you to know about the band. AM/FM’s one-sheet prominently features a quote…
The beautiful thing about much music is the way it always reacts to check itself and react to itself. Too many keyboards and too much pretense in your music? Just wait, and punk will come along to save the day. Hip-hop works under the same guidelines, and while one could never say that the more […]
There are two explanations for this CD, one considerably more credible than the other. On the one hand, this could be a bona fide comp of little-known Massachusetts bands, the tracks dug out of some long-lost archive up north of Boston…
It’s hard to pick on a group that has the good taste to cover East River Pipe (“Times Square Go-Go Boy”). It’s equally hard, however, to get very excited about that group when they pick that as the lead-off track, and it’s the best track on the CD…
In one of my junior years of college, an English prof asked the class what was the greatest work of literature, for all time. Myself, and a few others, volunteered the King James Version of the Bible, but we were overruled by the surly prof in favor of Moby Dick…
The most remarkable thing about Fiona Apple’s latest, verbosely-titled album isn’t the speed at which she engendered such a remarkable maturity (after all, Joni Mitchell blossomed from pretty good folkie to peerless soul-drenching singer-songwriter in the course of three years…
Damn, I hate that. You ever hear a song and swear you’ve heard something very much like it before, but can’t figure out where, even after ransacking your CD collection for those bands whose albums you heard only once? It’s like the aural equivalent of deja vu, I suppose…
I’ve known Thane Matcek, the main guy behind All Transistor, for a few years now, and he’s a great guy, but every time I talk to him, I get the feeling that he’s not quite there. It’s not super-obvious — he doesn’t talk to invisible people or twitch or scream profanity or anything like that…
To paraphrase Henry Rollins: “Rock rock baby rock, yeah!” And rock is exactly what this is, yeah, but what kind? Indie-rock? Post-punk? Modern rock? Emo? Hell, I don’t know, and more to the point, I don’t care. Maybe I’ll Catch Fire is just flat-out a great rock album…
I’ve listened to this album three times now, and I can barely remember a damn thing about it. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but for an album to get away with it, it should sound pretty great while it’s playing. The problem with Javelin Catcher…
I had this album for a long time before I was able to write anything about it. I listened to it several times and still have next-to-no recollection of the lyrics to any of the songs. And yes, I know that sounds bad, but strange as it sounds…
This is not what I’d expected, I must admit, especially from trad-ska mainstay Moon Records. This isn’t “straight” ska, by any means — hell, a lot of it isn’t ska at all. Two-thirds of the songs are funky, James Brown-/Percy Sledge-ish soul jams…
Hmm…didn’t somebody else do this a while back? Ah, who cares — Polyvinyl, one of the oddest, most interesting labels around, recently started up their own CD singles club, featuring new stuff from folks like Braid, Calvin Krime, Paris, Texas, and Burning Airlines (and American Football, naturally). I think it’s a very cool idea, especially […]
The future is about demographics. Actually, that’s misleading, since even today is really about demographics. Specifically, more and more the idea of niche marketing to smaller and smaller groups with more narrowly defined preferences is becoming not just commonplace…
A common term used to describe the music of A Minor Forest is “math rock.” Apart from the fact that this term has been applied to numerous bands that have vastly different styles, I dislike it because it implies that all math is identical. Which, is of course, ludicrous…
When I first got My Bloody Valentine’s classic Loveless, I used to open all the windows on sunny days, crank it up really loud, and pass out on the couch — it was an absolutely awesome way to spend an afternoon, trust me. And not to pigeonhole All Natural, etc., etc., but this disc makes me feel the same way…
