Luke Franks Or The Federalists play gentle indie folk-pop, and on their album The Way We Ran, Franks has the unfortunate problem of sounding like Dave Matthews. Their music isn’t as bad as Dave Matthews’ is — it has more of a Ryan Adams quality…
When you see a band calling themselves “Dirty South Revolutionaries,” a certain identity will come to mind. Most people will think of a rap act with a heavy political/sociological lyrical slant. The group that appears on Queen City Underground, however…
Don’t let the first 20 seconds of Almost and Always fool you — this isn’t Norah Jones’ new album. And it’s neither Simon nor Garfunkel. It’s David Mead. And it’s his fifth album since 1999. David Mead is a singer-songwriter whose music gives off a feel of early-’70s folk rock…
Glorytellers is Geoff Farina’s (Karate, Secret Stars) roots project. More folk-oriented than anything else he’s done, Atone is a beautiful, mature album, with lots of his interesting details in the band parts. The Glorytellers are probably the best complement for his delicate singing style yet…
If indie-rock could talk and if you got it drunk and just let it talk for a few hours, at that point, in the twilight of conversation, when neither party is really listening any more, but more helping each other to fill the void of silence…
To paraphrase the great comedy Blazing Saddles, “What in the Wide Wide World of Sports is this?” HORSE the band is a quintet of musicians from California that specialize in something called “Nintendocore”…
Honestly, it’s apparent right from the first stagger-stomp second of opening track “What the Misanthrope Said” which way Omotai’s Peace Through Fear is going to go: heavy, thundering, hammer-like slabs of sound crushing you to the floor while the gods look on, laughing, from high, high above…
This band must really hate writers. How else can you explain naming your band “The Ultra Siberian Pant Factory”? Length and depth of syllables aside, the inclusion of “Pant” and not “Pants,” like it should be, is a mother-humper…
Perhaps one of the most-hyped bands of 2010, Beach House belies its sedate, ambient piety with energetic and really, really loud performances. Teen Dream was released in early 2010 and set the course for Beach House’s current aesthetic departure from their previous albums’ output…
Damn, damn, damn. Well, I did have this grand plan of getting a bit of an early jump on the week’s/weekend’s shows, but sadly, other stuff intervened. And now, sadly, I am reduced to the grinding-it-out, day-by-day mess I typically end up doing. I need a time machine. Anybody got one I could borrow? Anyway…there’s […]
So, I’ve seen Dead To The World several times now, but I only recently procured their CD at a Röcbar show, and the best thing about it to me was that I recognized some of the songs immediately, so a major pro for this band is the strong continuity between their live and recorded music…
It’s funny, but while The Jonx do generally come off as a “serious” band — the flat-sounding talk-singing, the complex structures, the furious, almost jam-y feel to some of the songs — one of my favorite things about ’em is their almost subversive playfulness…
Wow. Tonight, Friday, April 9th, is shaping up to be one hell of a night, I swear. And yes, I’m saying that primarily because of the slew of H-town’s own who’re playing, not the handful of bigger-name folks touring through town; sorry, y’all, but most nights I’d really rather be blown away by the locals… […]
I’ve raved before in this here thing about Cleveland’s mr. Gnome and their idiosyncratic, hypnotically awesome amalgam of noisy rawk, metal sludge, ethereal vocals, and trip-hop groove, but dammit, I’m going to do it again right here, at least briefly. The band’s playing tonight (Thursday, April 8th) up at Rudyard’s, and trust me when I […]
Slow Gun Shogun is a one-man band whose first offering, a self-titled album recorded in Chicago, explores the simplicity of early country, folk, blues, and rock’n’roll. Comprised of five original songs and one cover (“Lonesome On’ry & Mean,” by Waylon Jennings), the album is a fairly standard interpretation…
“Quest For Fire”? Really? That’s the band name you decided on? I mean, why not at least do one of those 12-word names, or something with “wolf” in that all the hipsters dig? With a name like this, everyone is going to think that you are 1) a group of archaeologists doing authentic Cro-Magnon music…
The British indie-folk band’s follow-up to its highly successful debut album wasn’t quite what I expected, but I love it nonetheless. The First Days of Spring for the most part leaves behind the toe-tapping tunes we came to love on Peaceful, The World Lays Me Down…
DriftingFalling is a really cool little local label specializing in atmospheric electronica. They recently released the debut from Kontakte, a UK trio billed as a combination of “ethereal melodies, celestial tones and a pulsing electronic backbeat to produce a hypnotic noise with depth, space and staggering intensity”…
On seven-song EP Trying Got Us Nowhere, Elika, an electro-indie-pop band led by a female singer, is sure to have you swaying. It’s shoegazey and lush, not quite fitting into the 1980s. It’s nice mood music, for the background, sleeping, driving, or headphones…
Electric Courage Machine was one of my top stand-out bands for 2009. Hailing from New Braunfels, TX, they’re one of those bands that you marvel aren’t bigger than they are. Their latest EP, Wasted, was a steady fixture in my tape deck all summer…
sigh. Okay, so I know this is really, truly after-the-fact, shows-wise — Munchkin #1 and I ended up spending the bulk of our day at Comicpalooza, so that kinda ate into my usual last-minute posting time — but I wanted to get it up here anyway. The main reason is because I finally, finally got […]
Progression, I’m finding, is generally a good thing in the end, even if it doesn’t necessarily seem like it at first blush. Back in 2005, Tody Castillo’s self-titled solo debut appeared and promptly blew my doors off with its in-your-face hooky choruses…
Dead Plans, the second album from Detroit band The Bodies Obtained, has a creepy, 1980s-infused sound, with bleak lyrics and a well-thought-out combination of synthesizers. Their first album, From the Top of My Tree…
Nothing ruins a good idea more than poor execution, a point exemplified by “fusion” concepts. The world is full of them: the “Southwest eggroll,” hybrid cars less efficient than cars from the 1980s, countless movie sequels, etc. It takes a determined bit of genius to merge two concepts…
By all rights, this shouldn’t work. It really, seriously should not work — how could you expect it to, after all? Songs of awkward, nebbishy, teenage nerddom with titles like “My Mom Thinks I’m Cool” or “Unibrow,” played by a crew of guys who’re closer to my own age than they are to high school…
There’s an awesomely free, effortless feel to Miike Snow’s eponymous debut, so much so that you can practically hear the roguish grins and collective shrug — Miike Snow feels not like a trio of musicians setting out to “make” something, but instead just letting everything spill out and grabbing onto whatever sounds good…
What the hell, y’all? I mean, I know this is a week sopping wet with spillover from SXSW (and St. Paddy’s week, besides), but this is almost ridiculous — there’s a shitload of good stuff going on all damn week long, so much that I feel swamped even trying to talk about it. And yeah, […]
So I’ve kind of gone about this bass-ackwards, to be up-front about it, but honestly, I’m now thinking maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing. You see, I got a hold of a copy of the Hell City Kings’ 2009 LP, The Road to Damnation…
Relatively new on the scene, Crossing Togo consists of two men who create wonderful music together. They possess a pop-rock feel, with steady guitars and a likeable singing voice. Their songs are like a journey into a colorful landscape, with transcendentalist themes…
There’s a strangely rural thread that winds its way through the entirety of Akron/Family’s newest, Set ‘Em Wild, Set ‘Em Free, seemingly pointing backwards from the band’s NYC-bred sound to their roots in the Midwest, and that rustic, Middle America upbringing does indeed shine through…
Already talked about the other show this evening that I think sounds particularly cool, so I’m gonna hit the other one here — Midwest-by-way-of-NY psych trio Akron/Family are swinging through town tonight (Tues., February 23rd, obviously), hitting Walter’s with tourmates Warpaint and local heroes Buxton. And trust me when I say it’s gonna be freaking […]
Wow. It’s always a funny thing when you’ve heard a band before, liked the bits and pieces you’ve run across, and been curious to hear more, and then when you finally do get a glimpse of the full picture, as it were, you realize that you’d previously had no freaking idea what they were really about…
Deer Park boys The Gold Sounds know how to start off an album, that’s for damn sure. Opener “She Got Me Singin So Low” comes crashing in, so rambunctious and wild you can practically hear singer/bassist Sean Donnelly’s knowing smirk right through the speakers…
Holy crap, it is some weekend coming up, folks — I hardly know where to start. Okay, that’s not true, not really, because where I pretty much have to start is with my top two shows of this evening (Friday, February 12th), both of which will be utterly badass. First off, though, some sad news […]
The Fiery Furnaces’s eighth album, I’m Going Away, is their rock album — it’s much more linear and stripped down than their previous records, with much less of the crazily proggy stuff. The record is for those people who wish they’d cut out that wanky prog stuff and just rock…
Of the four tracks on Female Demand’s self-titled EP, the one that hits the hardest is the opener, “Sweet Nothing” — it starts off with almost wah-wah-sounding bass and stuttering, barely-restrained drums, then stomps its way into two minutes and change of driving, thundering, bass-and-drums instrumental rawk…
Psychedelia-infused ’60s-retro rock-pop is still in full force. It seems that a new artist in this very creative genre comes out every other week with a good-to-great album. Drug Rug’s latest album, Paint the Fence Invisible, is a beam of sunlight…
Got some new stuff up this week, so I wanted to pop over here & mention it, as well as hit the high notes for this evening (Friday, January 29th, you non-calendar-having bastards). First & foremost, I’m pleased as heck to announce that we’ve got the 2009 installment of the “WE LIKE THINGS” series, aka […]
When I first encountered Chase Hamblin, my instinct was to shrug and dismiss him as yet another Fab Four fan trying to keep the music he loves alive. While the characterization’s not wrong, though, the dismissal’s a big, big mistake. Rather than just rehash the Beatles for the umpteenth time…
Okay, I give: I’m not entirely sure what to make of Giant Battle Monster’s seven-track EP, Giant Battle Monster vs. The Man With a Gun for a Head. It’s a bewildering, chaotic listen, wedged halfway between mind-melting prog-metal, weird-ass pseudo-screamo…
