On their second album, Guerillaton, Made in Mexico combines two styles you wouldn’t think could possibly combine coherently, but they do — namely, no-wave and reggaeton. And they make it work really well, in a highly original take on either genre…
Looking backwards from a musical landscape populated by plenty of heavy/soft dynamic shifts, fiery power-chord guitars, and yelled/sung melodies, it occurs to me now the thing that drew me to the whole emo thing wasn’t really the music…
Yep, yep, yep — Friday night, and so here I am again posting this last-minute little note to mention that we’ve got a pile of brand-new reviews up (along with the excellent MI Ami interview I blathered about a few days ago). The reason for the hurried posting? Well, because this latest batch includes a […]
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…
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…
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…
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…
I think I’m overthinking this. I’ve been wrestling with The Points’ self-titled debut for way too long, trying to figure out something pithy to say about the Washington, DC, trio (Geo — guitar/vocals; Cobruh — drums/vocals; Rebecca — um, keyboards? really?)…
Die in June is Norwegian boy-band rockers Peel’s first release, and from the opening “Cutting Crew”-style keyboards, I knew this would be a chore. Honestly, I don’t even know if Peel is Buzz-radio-worthy…
I’ll admit that when it started, I was nervous. The bumping bass, the half-whispered (or half-muttered, maybe) vocals, the retro-sounding synths; it all made me wonder if Bright Nights, Bright Lights was headed straight into tepid, mid-’90s bland-rock territory…
The Coke Dares feature the rhythm section from the Magnolia Electric Company, but their stuff is nothing like Jason Molina’s — this is stripped-down punk rock, along the lines of Buzzcocks or the Minutemen but with a catchy garage-rock streak…
Austin’s Built By Snow’s sophomore release Mega injects a quick dose of Atari-influenced nerd-pop. I get the feeling these kids spent more time in arcades than J.J. Cooney, but instead of Fear, their headphones were jammin’ to The Cars and Cheap Trick while in battles with the Bishop…
Already posted about the review of the eponymous Golden Cities album, but I didn’t want to skip over the other excellent reviews up this week, as well, esp. since some of ’em are coming to town in the next week or so. Next up on the list, in fact, is Loney, Dear, who’ll be here […]
Gotta make this a quick one, a very cool review got slapped up on the site just in the nick o’ time, and I’d be very remiss if I flaked on it completely, y’know? So, here we go… Tonight at Rudyard’s, local boys/Esotype Recs honchos Golden Cities will be opening for The Appleseed Cast (along […]
I honestly didn’t think he’d be able to pull it off. After 2006’s mind-crushingly awesome Audition, with its paranoiac rhymes, punk-rock-ified beats, popcult-fueled riffs on suicide and revenge, and full-on angry-ass vibe, I figured nah, there was no way…
Long-running goofballs the New Duncan Imperials bring plenty of their inspired nonsense to their eigth album, End of Phase One. The band pilfers a multitude of styles, from garage to punk to ’50s rock, and cuts it all with the silliness and catchiness of the Replacements…
Minneapolis indie outfit Maps of Norway has released their second album, Die Off Songbird, touting somewhat elevated guitar ramblings and vocal presence over their first outing. Featuring ex-Vespertine Jeff Ball (drums) and Eric Hanson…
Ever since I first heard “Airport Surroundings” on NPR’s All Songs Considered back in December, I have not been able to get Loney, Dear out of my head. I waited patiently for almost two months to be able to have that particular song and others from the new album…
There’s a scene in H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine where the Time Traveler pushes his machine millions of years into the future and sits on a beach under a dying red sun. There, he watches life itself begin to fade, like a person with terminal cancer slipping off bit by bit…
“Look at me I’m the next big thing,” sings Crisis in Hollywood singer Adrian Snyder, and with his band’s anticipated debut album, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, he may be on his way. The band, which consists of Daniel Valery on guitars, Logan Berton on bass…
It’d be way, way easy to lump Golden Cities in with the whole guitar-heavy, spacey-atmospherics crowd, tag them as Explosions in the Sky 2.0 (3.5?), and move on. I mean, there’s a fair bit of doubled, echoey guitars on here…
Barely three weeks into 2009, and believe it or not, there’s already a seeming torrent of eagerly-anticipated releases exploding out of H-town. Seriously; there’s now new stuff out by The Wild Moccasins and The Born Liars, with stuff right around the corner from Young Mammals, The Tontons, Teenage Kicks, and listenlisten. Oh, and then there’s […]
Bay Area band Totimoshi is a power trio not afraid to sound much bigger than their numbers. Milagrosa, Totimoshi’s fifth album, is big, bombastic stuff. Jangly guitars mix well with a thumping bass and heavy…
Eyes At Half Mast is the latest release from Portland, Oregon’s Talkdemonic, originally a solo project (founding member Kevin O’Connor’s first shows used pre-recorded backing tracks), Talkdemonic blends hip-hop…
Loud (well, mostly), guitar-heavy, grunge-influenced rawk with vocals that swerve back and forth between Vince Neil, Chris Cornell, and Rob Zombie; that’s Joetown (known to his ‘rents, apparently, as Joe Delaney) all the way…
I’m still a little bit confused about why these two totally separate groups chose to share one forty-minute-long EP divided into two über-lengthy tracks. The best way to express their relationship is to list their commonalities…
Minneapolis punk band Dillinger Four finally returns with their fourth album. Civil War is another slice of their Hüsker Dü-meets-Southern Califoria sound. If anyone was worried about the band’s six-year break between albums…
After a lot of thought, I’ve realized that the thing I like the most about the Born Liars, what makes ’em stand out from the crowd of loud, punkish, garage-y rockers, is, well, that they’ve got heart. It sounds sappy, I know, but it’s the truth…
It was like walking alone in the mind of a person tripping on acid while hallucinating on mushrooms. The guitar strummed, and it began; the sounds hit like a wave of colors smacking me in the face, waking me up to a new world…
I’m envious. Honestly, that’s what I am — I mean, how can I not be? With their eagerly-anticipated Microscopic Metronomes EP, The Wild Moccasins have distilled the essence…
Austin duo Followed By Static has been quietly gathering praise as their songs float through the music scene. The sound on their five-track Demo*lition EP may be rough, but their point of view is quite clear…
A good one tonight up at Walter’s on Washington — Austinites Followed By Static will be playing, as will fellow out-of-townies (Dallasians) Nervous Curtains and very, very, very cool local folks Antarctica Starts Here. Beyond the fact that I’m extremely happy to see ASH playing once more (it seemed like there was a quiet period […]
No burning must-see bands/CDs burning a virtual hole in my/our virtual pocket right at this second, but we’ve got good new shit up on the site, nonetheless, courtesy of our hardworking crew of writers & volunteers, some of whom were apparently working harder than, um, I was over the holidays. (Dang…) Anyway, it’s a good-looking […]
On their debut album, Aperture For Departure, Strangers Die Every Day play instrumental chamber rock, reminiscent of Dirty Three with the rock feel of Papa M. The use of the violin and cello gives the group a distinct quality…
As Frank Zappa & The Mothers so cryptically stated it in one of their early songs, “What would you do if the people you knew…were the plastic that melted and the chromium, too?” The only thing I can possibly imagine theoretically rising back up…
Pale Young Gentlemen was founded in 2004 by brothers Michael and Matt Reisenauer, and has grown steadily over the last few years both in body count and musical range. Today, the critically acclaimed Wisconsinites travel…
Northern Liberties has been around awhile, playing up and down the East Coast and only recently getting as far west as Dallas. (They skipped Houston, for some strange reason. Or not.) Ghost Mind Electricity is interesting…
It’s almost impossible these days to classify bands — what’s the difference between hardcore and post-punk? The difference between emocore and plain old emo? Between grindcore and shit?…
In 1988, while I was in high school, I received the Holy Grail from a friend of mine who prided himself on his collection of tapes: a copied 60-minute Memorex with Guns N’ Roses’ Appetite for Destruction on one side and Metallica’s Ride the Lightning on the other…
My cynical side wants to sneer at Matt Duke’s Kingdom Underground, tossing it aside as just another Adult Alternative-ready singer-songwriter. Fortunately, that cynicism ends up being undermined by Duke himself…
