Here we go again. White boy falsetto vocals? Good! Extra dirty guitar riffs? Great! Drums played by a monkey on speed? Awesome! Add that together, and you have a 30-minute, 10-track, lo-fi dance-pop album that aims to please. Boston clearly loves their hometown heroes, and so should you. Get Young opens with "Piranha," followed by "Tora Tora Tora," and from there on in the whole thing just shouts at you to jump around. There's so much energy in this album -- outside of the forth track "Peekaboo," which is clearly a chance for the band to take a break, grab some coffee, and recharge for the last five tracks -- that it's ridiculous.

I really wonder, however, how much I'd like Get Young had I not been listening to Fugazi and Ghostface Killah the week before. It's a caffeinated shot to the ears and it's kind of refreshing, but what if I had I been listening to, say, the White Stripes, Vampire Weekend, or Tokyo Police Club? Perhaps I would have been less impressed.

That's the whole problem with this CD: as good as it might be, it gets lost in the milieu of lo-fi noise-rock with which we've been inundated for the past few years. So while, yes, Get Young is a good CD, and songs like "Hideaway Tokyo" make me want to get up and dance, if I were into that kind of thing, when it's all said and done, you're left with another good album that isn't able to stake it's claim at the top. (Daniel Yuan // 03/04/09)

They always say to never judge a book by its cover. That's never been truer with the new CD by Rahway, Snitches Get Stitches. The cover looks like a Photoshop project that a band member did in school. Ten years ago.

Don't let the generic graphics fool you, however, because what lies inside is a terrific collection of hard rock that manages to combine some of yesteryear's staples with today's influence. Appropriately named after the infamous New Jersey industrial wasteland, the band seems to embody the area's solid work ethic. Starting off with "Machine," you're struck by how the band's melded a traditional hard rock track with a modern feel -- it counterbalances angst-ridden lyrics with a hooky yet seemingly off-key chorus. The band does a unique balancing act, going from Mötley Crüe to Creed.

The 14-track CD is loaded with several solid rockers, mixed in with generically-named power ballad "I Can Feel It." The song wouldn't be so bad, except that it follows "Draggin Fire," another slow-tempo track, and the both help to bring the momentum to a screeching halt. All in all, though, Rahway has made a solid album. While it may feel dated at times, so what? (Scott Whitt // 03/18/09)

The Reel Banditos are an instrumental trip-hop duo based in Hamburg. On Indochina, their second album, the Reel Banditos incorporate lots of unprocessed sounds in their material, from guitars to keyboards to all sorts of percussion. The nominal subject of the record is the Vietnam War, but only a few of the songs are directly inspired by the war; it seems to be more of a loose theme. Concept aside, the record does cover a broad range of feels, from heavy rock to hip-hop to more electronic sounds. And they do have good taste in riffs.

One of the coolest beats is "Huey," which, appropriately enough, begins with loud thudding drums processed to sound like helicopter rotors, which become a theme throughout. The song has a big, heavy rock feel to it, accompanied by loud distorted guitar chords, but despite its heaviness, it somehow remains groovy.

"The Continental" manages to combine a spacey, atmospheric beat with lots of percussion and a disorienting feel. The band members use extremely long delay to keep things floating and keep things slightly off-kilter by occasionally weaving an extra beat in, along with an occasional piano dissonant cluster. Not the sort of thing you normally find in your trip-hop.

Overall, Indochina is a beautiful record, covering a wider range of ground than you might otherwise expect. And they are good at coming up with cool melodies, from the slide guitar in "Grunt," to the minimalist marimba part in "The Cu Chi Tunnels," to the distorted guitar in "Poisoned Sky." And all the parts come together in occasionally unpredictable ways. These guys have put together something unusual. (Henry Mayer // 03/18/09)

With Carving Desert Canyons, Scale The Summit does something few other instro-metal bands have been able to do, at least for me -- they've taken the long-reviled guitar-shredder motif, stripped it of all the jaded, post-ironic hipsterness, set it on fire, and aimed the burning ship straight at the heart of the sun. And that's a good thing from where I sit, because these days honest-to-God guitar heroics-for-heroics'-sake have become nearly an auditory gag, a trick in a band's repertoire that allows them to sit back and smirk while saying, "see, I can do this; I just choose not to 'cause I'm too cool."

Hell, even in the heyday of guitar instrumentalism, when guitar-tab rags outnumbered hip-hop magazines and kids dreamed of being the next Nuno Bettencourt, there was a weird fakery to it all. The guitar gods of yore weren't doing it for The Rock, despite what they'd have had you believe, but for all the blow and chicks that came with it. And they were shticky, too, with everybody trying to one-up one another, to come up with the next great guitar virtuoso trick that'd send the kids running back to their bedrooms to spend hours trying to figure out how the hell that guy did that.

Scale The Summit, though, they don't fall into that trap -- there's no misplaced, over-the-top gimmickry going on here, but rather careful, meticulously thought-out and choreographed compositions that just happen to use guitars to do what the band wants to do. These aren't songs; they're orchestral set-pieces, as gorgeous and weighty and masterful as a symphony doing its thing. There's a serenely calm, almost smiling vibe to the whole thing, where you can practically picture the band members on stage just weaving in and out of one another, layering guitar line upon guitar line. At the same time, the fervor with which the four guys in Scale The Summit attack their instruments makes it clear that they are in this for The Rock, whether or not it takes them anywhere.

As the album's title implies, of course, this is considerably heavier than most symphonies you're likely to hear, and that's "heavy" in terms of plate tectonics; the guitars simultaneously grind and soar, sounding more like the soundtrack to natural upheavals than, say, star-crossed lovers or Vikings fighting hordes of zombies or something. Listening to tracks like "Age of the Tide," with its soaring, touch-the-sky, Satriani riffs, or album high point "The Great Plains," with its fucking brilliant pre-break motif and heavily prog-rock bass, makes me feel like I'm sitting in an IMAX theater somewhere, watching on a 6-story high screen as some time-lapsed glacier roars silently down a moraine. It's utterly epic, but in a grandeur-of-nature sort of way.

Obviously, these guys owe a fair amount to modern instro-rock contemporaries like Pelican, The Fucking Champs, or Red Sparowes, but they grab tight to that torch and turn it incandescent, to the extent where if you gave me the choice of listening to only one of the three aforementioned bands or Scale The Summit ever again, I'd pick STS in a heartbeat. When you dig beneath the crust of thundering, Mastodon-heavy guitar rhythms, too, there's a heavy prog-metal influence going on, with bright shards of Dream Theater or Fates Warning peeking out.

And yep, there's also a lot of insanely nimble, nearly jazz-y Steve Vai-/Eric Johnson-esque guitar-god acrobatics, enough to launch a whole new generation of guitar magazines. The band brings to mind Johnson's Ah Via Musicom, in particular, with their crazy "keyboard-or-guitar?" tone; as with Johnson, the guitars start to seem less like actual instruments and more like some kind of weird, beautiful, otherworldly sounds. Put it all together, and it's majestic and crushing at once, perfectly envisioned and pulled off like it was crafted by a bunch of guitar-wielding savants. I honestly don't think I've ever heard an instrumental guitar album -- of any era -- this start-to-finish fucking mind-blowingly cool.

[Scale The Summit is playing 5/2/09 at Javajazz Coffee House in Spring, along with Protest The Hero, Misery Signals, & The Number Twelve Looks Like You.] (Jeremy Hart // 03/04/09)

Provo, Utah-based band Shark Speed released their first full-length, independent album, Sea Sick Music, this month at a CD release show in Provo, where the band handed out the album free to all who attended. The band took out loans and scraped together the money necessary to travel to Arizona to record the album all on their own and are now in the process of sending it out to different indie labels.

Sea Sick Music is a 10-track, 37-minute album full of catchy, dance-rock music that does an exceptional job of capturing the energy of the band's live performances. Each time I listen to the album, I love it more and more, and each time I see them play and hear the now-familiar songs, my fascination with the album grows even greater.

From the beginning of "Cast Off Dance Off," my personal favorite, all the way to the last track, "Ten to Twenty Years," listeners will be caught tapping along and humming to the beat. Besides the pure catchiness of the album and the crystal-clear sound it radiates, what really draws me in to the album each time is the charming voice of vocalist Thayne Fagg. His clever lyrics draw from a range of issues, from death and old flings to dealing with personal failures. Adding to the appeal is the band's use of the trumpet in many of its songs.

Shark Speed's first full-length is a hit in my book. Although they are yet unsigned, I'm excited to see what will come in the future; they're going to be huge. This album, I feel, is flawless. They couldn't have done any better on their first go-round. (Spencer Flanagan // 03/04/09)

Those hoping for Electric Psychedelic Sitar Headswirlers Vol. 88 may not get exactly what they're looking for, but this is a fine release from Urck nonetheles. It's a two-CD (it was issued on vinyl a while back) set of avant-garde, traditional, psych and electronic sounds made primarily by Westerners on stuff like ouds, singing bowls, gamelans, and dulsitars, as well as typical rock gear. There're a few recognizable names here -- Amps For Christ, Muslimgauze, Bill Horist -- but for the most part, it's a pretty obscure assembly (Catastrophic Mermaids On Parade, anyone?) that'll give adventurous record junkies some new leads to follow.

Ever since the Beatles and the Stones brought home sitars and tablas, musicians from Europe and the Americas have looked to the East for inspiration to get a little further out, and those tunings and tones are well represented here. This ride doesn't just stop at the Indian Sub-continent or the Middle East, though; the Orient is here in spirit, as well. Making the trip all the more authentic (and disorientating) are the side trip field recordings of strolls through Indian markets, bells, arguments, prayers, and jam sessions overheard through paper windows.

There aren't really any downers here except for some cheesy spoken lyrics (thanks, F-Space and Baba Larriji) on a mostly instrumental happening, and Muslimgauze's electronic track sounds only roughly more "Asiatic" to these ears than say, Eddie Money. The winners make it worth the price of admission, though, and theres plenty of standouts.

Forgotten Fish Memory Orchestra & Amps For Christ start it off with a sun-baked pair of daydreams, and you're already "there" moments after takeoff. Volcanosis' "Galapagobeats" sounds a bit like a Psychic Ills/Bardo Pond tag team. Metal Rouge brings first rate drone that transcends yer socks off. Frith-like guitar wizard Bill Horist gives us a Morse code tap dance and mystic violin serenade, supposedly with only guitar, screwdriver, and bow (I want video proof). Moe! Staiano's "Chungking" is a percussive blast that could bring the Boredoms to attention. Neung Phak delivers a fun little ditty that's equal parts "Telstar," spaghetti Western, and dub that somehow still sounds a little Oriental.

Go ahead and get it for yourself or, better yet, get it as a gift for a friend that wants to get into "world musics"; they won't like it, so they'll give it back and you can take it back to your opium den feeling good about it. (SCR Staff // 03/18/09)

What do you do when the big-name, influential as all get-out metalcore band you're doing time in crashes and burns? In the case of From Autumn To Ashes' Francis Mark and Rob Lauritsen, well, you get a chance to finally do that side project-type thing together that you've wanted to do for a while now, and do something that's at least a little bit different in the process.

Not that Warship's debut, Supply and Defend, truly does a whole lot that's new, mind you. The songs the duo (Mark on vocals and drums, Lauritsen on guitars and bass) comes up with meld together the guys' metalcore roots, all speedy thrash and chunky guitars and half-screaming vocals, with doom-y, bluesy, straight-up metal a la Early Man, Federation X, and the like. The result is thundering, bass-heavy, with guitars that swerve between Pelican and Deftones, coupled with vocals that are shredded and ragged but never incomprehensible. It's heavy and raw, but not as far over-the-top as screamo, thankfully, and incorporates quite a bit of actual melody (again, drawing things nearer to Deftones territory, or maybe Far). A handful of the tracks are downright pretty, albeit in a desperate way, not something I'd tend to expect from a couple of metalcore vets.

Lauritsen's bass, all things considered, is the band's secret weapon. I've got no clue how Lauritsen makes his sound so crunching and heavy, but still keep it well-defined. It's big and grand, heavy but nowhere near sludgy, and that's no mean feat. His bass is like the sound of some old-world deity stomping across the landscape; it's "big" like a thundercloud is "big," and just as impressive. That said, he's no solo player. In spite of Warship being a two-man band, Supply and Depend feels a hell of a lot like a tightly-coiled four-piece unit.

Lyrically, this tends to be some deep stuff. Not pretentious, really, but deep, kind of a ten-song meditation on the burnt-out and cracked-wide-open state of the world; tracks like "Wounded Paw" and "Empty Vessel" are about searching for meaning in a world that sometimes seems designed to keep us stupid and compliant. It's got a serious political bent, but not in a real specific way, just more of a "fight the system" feel that's reminiscent at times of a less-overt Strike Anywhere.

Even the titles of songs like "Profit Over People" and "We've Never Been Equal" pretty much spell out Frank's general worldview. Will Supply and Depend change the universe, musically or sociopolitically? Nah, probably not. But it's a nice change of pace, all the same. (Jeremy Hart // 03/04/09)

I'm not completely sure what to make of the intertwined, fuzzy (well, partly), messy knot of an album that is the self-titled debut of Calgary foursome Women. When it first starts, with the haunted voices, fucked-up guitars, and thwacking drums of too-short "Cameras," I feel like I'm staring down the barrel of a reinvented VU, primitive-sounding and raw but still melodic and 21st Century-ized, a little like Comet Gain without the Britishisms. "Lawncare" takes that initial noisy scrape and morphs it into a fair impersonation of a ceaseless, relentless machine, which then subtly fades into the background -- nicely done, by the way, so that I almost don't realize it's happening -- to form a bed of rhythm laid beneath plinking, delicately insistent guitars and distant, nearly choral vocals. "Woodbine" strips away even the machinery, leaving only a simmering, roiling, vocal-less mess of feedback and noise.

And then everything changes. With "Black Rice," suddenly me and the band are standing out in an empty field somewhere, and they're all strumming guitars and singing sunshiny, sincere, retro, handclaps-and-all psych-pop that sounds like it slid languidly off some forgotten compilation in your hippie uncle's back closet. What the fuck are these guys playing at, here? "Sag Harbor Bridge" makes things even stranger, dropping me headlong into a beautifully nimble, fingerpicked bit of instrumental guitar work, just echoing, back-and-forth guitars, shallow waves of synth, and a quiet bass drum thump in the background; at that point, I'm thinking maybe it's all a fake, that the primitivism shtick from earlier was just a lure to get me in so they could carve me up with the shards of Byrds albums or something.

"Group Transport Hall" and "Shaking Hand" somewhat solidify things, however -- the former is similar to "Black Rice," but less pretty and more Clinic-esque, with a nice, driving rhythm, while the latter takes those churning, mid-fi, trebly guitars from the beginning and welds them to the fleet-fingered playing later on. Ah, I'm thinking, okay; I get it now. This is what this band's really about. Only that's when the trip starts to go bad again. "Upstairs" is chunky and shambling but not too overbearing, but then "January 8th" is out-and-out frantic, building towards some crescendo it never really reaches, and it leads straight into "Flashlights," which is scattered, spiraling cycles of instrumentation winding down and down and down itself. And then it's done.

There's something weirdly captivating about Women -- I can't really say that I like it, because I'm not entirely convinced I do, but I'm having a hard time turning away, instead feeling compelled to bob my head to the quirky guitars and propulsive drums. There's a magnetic pull to it, in part because my brain's continually trying to figure out what the hell's going on. A glance at the credits helps; the whole thing was produced by Chad VanGaalen (for whom the men of Women serve as a backing band, to boot), a guy who's made his own musical name cobbling together bizarre piles of sound, layering his voice over it, and somehow making it work. Yeah, then it all snaps into focus and makes a kind of sense.

Not that Women are VanGaalen-Gone-Band-Sized, mind you; where his songs are like tiny, fragile icicles of melody that are pretty when they shouldn't be, Women's compositions really are like some kind of dangerous, schizophrenia-inducing drug. You hang on in part because you don't know where you're going, and sometimes it's scary and sometimes it's sunny, but the journey's worth it in the end.

[Women is playing 3/18/09 at Rudyard's, along with Crystal Stilts & Chase Hamblin.] (Jeremy Hart // 03/18/09)