The Constantines sound like Bruce Springsteen if he and the E Street band had grown up listening to Fugazi -- here, even the keyboard player is a punk rocker! Between the Constantines' preference for anthems and the singer's unique voice, they have a distinctive sound. Emotionally they're warmer than punk-rock usually allows, in the traditional rock sense -- not many punk bands would have dared to write something as unabashedly romantic as "Nighttime/Anytime (It's Alright)," from their last album, Shine A Light. Tournament of Hearts has more variety than Shine A Light, however: different kinds of arrangements, more dynamics, some mellower songs, even something that could be considered country. Their keyboard player may be their secret weapon; he adds really nice touches that are interesting, partly because keyboards aren't normally allowed by the post-punk mythos, but also because the parts simply work well.

In "Working Full Time," the drum intro and the chorus reveal that the song is in fact a hard rock song, despite the droning rhythm guitar and bass during the verses. And nothing could be more populist than the subject matter, since it's the one thing that everyone, regardless of class or musical interest, does. The band adds changes in the verse structure that bring the rock in a really interesting way, and the added keyboard riff turns the song into a thing of beauty.

"Hotline Operator" is the most complicated song on the record, but it doesn't sound like it because it's so ingeniously structured and arranged. The song changes meter at certain points, but the melody is strong enough to sustain the song. The arrangement is also very cool -- it starts out very quiet, with a single rhythm guitar, and adds instruments and intensity at one point a couple of minutes in, but it never builds to the rampaging climax until the last seconds of the song, after which it cuts out. The vocals are the most dynamic part of the song, which for a post-punk song is quite a change.

"Soon Enough" is another great song. This one sounds something like modernist country. The song doesn't swing like a good country song, and the band spends their time doing all of their normal jagged things, but the song's melody, along with the pretty harmonies, define it as a country song. It certainly helps that here the singer (either Bryan Webb or Steve Lambke, not sure which; both are credited with vocals) doesn't shout once -- he sings the song in a normal tone rather than his usual call. That's the other thing that makes it such a nice song, despite everyone's best intentions. (Henry Mayer // 01/24/06)

There was a time when garage rock was considered a thing of the past. Fortunately for its fans, it was reborn earlier this decade with bands like The Strokes and The White Stripes. Since then, however, so many other neo-garage rock bands have emerged in the shadow of such bands that the whole movement could be pretty much considered a fad and dismissed as such. But fear not, rockers, for a new group in the genre has put a twist or two on the "garage" label and made things more interesting -- they call themselves The Goons of Doom.

Consisting of some former pro surfers, these Aussies play the standard three/four/five-chord rock song, but they occasionally throw in some punk rhythm and vocals. They also stain the not-so-proper-but-still-somewhat-clean image of their genre cohorts, by writing songs with titles like "She Wore Rat Skin Boots" and "Blood on the Streets," and they spend no time dressing to impress anyone.

The Goons combine the song structures of virtually any garage rock band, the aesthetics of The Sex Pistols, the themes of The Misfits, and the sound of The Ramones. Simple though it is, this EP is a fun listen that few rock fans would dislike. So, if you tire of sappy, lovey-dovey rock songs and avoid peppermint-clothing motifs, put Bikey Zomby on your stereo, listen to it, and call me in the morning. (Patrick Graham // 01/24/06)

Sometimes, you either get something or you don't. That's the conclusion I came to when I saw Houston rockers the Jonx play a few years back; after the first two or three songs, my wife was grimacing and shaking her head. "This sucks," she grumbled, "let's get out of here and see who else is playing." Being the dutiful husband (since I'd already dragged her out of the house on a weeknight to see several bands she'd never heard of), I agreed, and we bailed as surreptitiously as we could from the tiny confines of the club.

Far from being annoyed or disgusted, though, I'd been standing there with a big grin on my face. While apparently the off-kilter indie-rock stylings of the Jonx wasn't my wife's cup of tea, for me I was drawn back to the early days of post-punk noise, back when nobody knew what the hell people like Pere Ubu and Sonic Youth were doing, so they just called it "punk." Listening to the band was like rifling through old Fugazi, Minutemen, and June of 44 albums, what with all the shouted-sung vocals, weird time signatures, and disjointed guitars that sound like noise until you listen real closely and hear the sound coalesce into a half-buried melody. I thought it was great.

Fast forward a year or two, watch a couple of band members fall by the wayside (Shawn Durrani and Viki Keener, who I believe were still in the band when I saw 'em), and the remaining Jonxers finally have an album out, The Return of the Death of the Legacy of the Revenge of the Jonx. And while it's not as turbulent and messy as the live show I caught, the elements I liked are still there. Tracks like "Metal," an alternately speeding/stomping take on sludge-metal that comes off like Ian MacKaye fronting the Melvins, the muscular groove of the instrumental "China's Fault," and a lower-key (but still tense and menacing) version of "Murder" all recall those same noisy, quirky rock touchstones.

The songs intersperse Stu Smith's sharp, angry guitars with Trey Lavigne's churning basslines and Danny Mee's collapsing drums, and marry it all with yelled and spoken lyrics from all three, and the recipe works pretty well. Put all together, it carries an air of danger, which ably deconstructs any kind of pretentiousness and makes me want to compare the band to The Vehicle Birth or NoMeansNo. (I should probably note, by the way, that Danny's also a contributor to Space City Rock, but trust me -- he gets no special treatment here.)

Lyrically, The Return of... seems pretty bleak, at least at first. A lot of the songs touch on violence and disillusionment in various forms (see "Metal," "Man Without a Country," and "To Your Health," for three), but at the same time, there's an underlying optimism. Sometimes it's hard to tell if the band's being serious or applying that patented Indie-Rock Sarcasm^TM (as on "Everything Makes Me Happy," especially considering its "flipside" track, "Everything Makes Me Sad"), but when I listen to "I Party to Celebrate Friendship," it seems unthinkable that they're not being sincere. Tracks like "Orange Like the Future," though, give the proceedings a kind of paranoiac, claustrophobic feel. I guess that while music can sometimes be black-and-white, it doesn't always have to be. (Jeremy Hart // 01/24/06)

Albums like Orents Stirner's Our Names In Concrete are why music reviewers find the word "stark" so necessary. Like Pink Moon with an infinitesimally larger recording budget, it's built on a lot of acoustic guitar, a single voice, a touch of reverb and the barest smattering of other instruments not performed by lone permanent member Fletcher Stafford. It's not a determinedly focused singularity like Pink Moon, though, just a collection of fractured, lugubrious tunes that aren't given enough room to build to anything particularly substantial. That's the Guided By Voices problem, but the songs on Our Names In Concrete don't possess the immediate melodic explosions that counteracted GbV's compositional fragmentation, opting instead for a downcast Magnolia Electric Co flatline that's more enervating than affecting. The end result is a collection that sounds important and deeply meaningful to the person responsible for it but throws up a wall before reaches the outside of the speakers. When "Future Was Red" invokes "Wish You Were Here" before becoming a continuation of the preceding "Making Plans," I find myself wishing that I was listening to that album instead. (Marc Hirsh // 01/24/06)

You know how sometimes you think to yourself, "Man, I wish I could listen to something just a little Shins-y but not quite so upbeat. A little Smiths-y at the same time would really hit the spot"?

Okay, nobody ever thinks that. But if you did, The Rosebuds would fit the bill perfectly. An old-school indie band out of Raleigh, North Carolina, The Rosebuds evoke not only the bands above, but also other recent breakout bands such as Bloc Party, Franz Ferdinand, and the New Pornographers. Husband and wife Ivan Howard and Kelly Crisp share vocals on most of the songs and, not surprisingly, use their relationship as source material for much of the lyrics on the album.

The album holds together as a whole very well, transitioning from song to song without too much jarring, and yet at the same time managing to not sound like the same song over and over. "Hold Hands and Fight", the first track and one of the strongest on the album, starts slow and then breaks into a more vibrant ending -- in sound very reminiscent of the Old 97s. "Boxcar", another very strong track, further energizes the listener with a nice driving guitar before giving way to the more folksy "Leaves Do Fall". "Wildcat" slows everything down to near Nick Drake levels before giving way to "The Loveršs Rights", the most Smiths-y song on the album (okay, last time I use that made up word, I promise). "Blue Bird" is a nice dreamy interlude, but not terribly memorable, before moving on to the more straight-ahead classic rock sound of "Outnumbered". "Shake Our Tree" is probably the most fun song on the album, a playful call and response between husband and wife. "Let Us Go" and "Warm Where You Lay" are both pleasant enough, but quite forgettable, and not quite as catchy as the rest of the album. The final track, "4-Track Love Song", while musically very different than the rest of the album -- having more in common with a Projekt compilation than with the pop sound of the preceding material -- shows that the band does have an impressive range of musical styles to draw from.

All in all, a great sophomore effort from a band with a great sound that seems to be evolving. (Anish Masharani // 01/24/06)