Dang. I’ve had a hard time getting a handle on this one; it makes some sense, though, since Woozyhelmet’s Get Down is the latest by a band that has vexed me in the past, where live performances left me reeling…
Listening to XX Teens’ debut album, Welcome to Goon Island, it’s quite obvious that they’re British. This five-man band of London college friends have crafted a collection of songs so delectable that you want to call your travel agent and book a trip to Goon Island yourself…
This one was somewhat of a surprise. Based on Austin band Ume’s past releases and live show, I went into their new self-titled EP fully expecting to be knocked out of my chair by the sheer sonic force coming out of the speakers. They have a well-deserved reputation of being a heavy-ass band…
Was it around 2003 when there was an explosion of bands reviving the ’70s bluesy garage-pop thing? Well, the Starlite Desperation has that sound down to a T, and if they had released Take It Personally five years ago, they would have been at the forefront of that movement…
It may sound crazy, but when I listen to power-pop/punk crew Something Fierce’s new full-length, There Are No Answers, I feel like I’m getting a peek at the heart & soul of guitarist/singer Steven Garcia; everything’s laid bare, raw and bleeding and heartfelt…
Eivind Opsvik is a Norwegian bass player currently based in New York, and he’s assembled some excellent sidemen for his “Overseas” jazz project. His latest album, Overseas III, features Tony Malaby on tenor and Kenny Wolleso on drums, as well as pedal steel player Larry Campbell…
So, it appears that I’m once again too late. The New Frontiers, the quintet out of Dallas, has disbanded and frankly, it’s a shame. Another promising band calling it quits too early — and not just too early, but one week before I listen to their album…
Sing Into My Mouth, by Saint Paul, Minnesota’s Gospel Gossip, begins, in classic Butthole Surfers’ style, with ambient guitar strums and jangles as parentheses around a series of recorded samples. It’s nothing new, I’ll admit, but neither is the “Star Spangled Banner” before a baseball game…
There’s a sweetly pastoral, serene feel to The Eastern Sea’s debut(?) EP that I can’t help but love. The songs all sail along like musical interludes in an intricately-plotted play, probably set in a bedroom somewhere — for some reason, these songs have a dreamlike quality to them…
At its core, Glory Be! (the EP!), the latest release from quintet News on the March is, well, backwoods bedroom-pop. There’s countrified sincerity dripping from every note, alternately echoey and jangly, rough-yet-pretty guitars, down-at-the-heels lyrics that’re perfect to mumble along to…
Like many other completely annoying Canadian artists/bands (Nickelback, Bryan Adams, Celine Dion), with their lates release, Cities of Glass, Canadian noise-rock band AIDS Wolf is hardly even worth taking the time to write about…
Very rarely do you run a cross an album title that perfectly sums up your feelings about the music. The latest from Trapt, Only Through The Pain, though, fits the bill. The only way I was able to finish this review was to persevere though the pain…
Tiger! Shit! Tiger! Tiger! moves fast. The Italian post-punk trio has been together for just over a year and already has an album to show for it. Be Yr Own Shit is their unimpressive debut, sounding like a senior thesis project at The Rapture School of Music…
After roughly five years of playing and performing together, Austin-based band Second Day Red has released a new bevy of engaging songs under the album heading Gallery of Strangers. Fronted by singer/songwriter Stephen Clarke, this five-piece group interacts marvelously…
Oxford Collapse has got to be one of the happiest bands out there. Everything about the band is upbeat — from the happy vocals to the not-too-agressive guitar to the groovy drums. Even when the singer is shouting and the drums are pummeling, the band still doesn’t sound intense…
Like Kevin Shields going acoustic, singing campfire songs about the end of the world. This is the soundtrack to bad things happening in the distance; it’s pretty, and it makes you nervous. It should be the soundtrack to the movie version of The Road…
Fight Bite, who currently calls Denton, TX, home, is an ambient-ish duo composed of Leanne Macomber of The Snowflakes and Jeff Louis of Teenage Symphony. Their debut album, Emerald Eyes, is…something else. If you’re one of the lucky few…
Loud. No, really — loud. I’m discovering that if you don’t listen to the Born Liars’ latest 7″ with the volume cranked to levels likely to piss off the people around you, well, you’re honestly missing out. You’re missing the scraping, raw, garage-rawk fury…
Okay, so I love that somebody finally used the word “Caddywhompus” for a band name (I mean, how can you not like a word that evokes both pimp-daddy Cadillacs and whupping up on somebody?), and am therefore predisposed to like…
This is what I get for staying off the email/message boards so I can hang with the family & all that. Trying to be good & do stuff with my mom & little girl & all that, and lo and behold, a fairly big-time show rolls surreptitiously into town, slipping right beneath my (admittedly often […]
Coldplay is a band that listeners either love or hate — there’s rarely any middle ground. Thankfully, Viva La Vida… — with obvious help from über-producer Brian Eno — is enough of a departure for the band…
Yes, the disc’s been out a little while now, I realize, but what the hey — we sure as hell haven’t weighed in on it ’til now, and that’s what really counts, dammit. So, courtesy of Houston Calling honcho, sometime SCR contributor, and all-round cool guy David Cobb, we’ve now got a review of the […]
So, let’s say you’re a member of this noisy (yet majestic), ear-destroyingly loud, static-soaked, sorta conspiracy-minded noise-rock band. You put out two albums’ worth of anthemic noise bombast…and then what?…
No time right now to run down the whole list of awesomely awesome shows going on this weekend — gotta go greet the wife’s cousins, in town from little-bitty Soderfors, Sweden — but I’ve got to mention this one… Tonight (Friday, Nov. 7th), NYC noisemakers Parts & Labor are making their third stop through Houston […]
As hinted at previously, it’s been a loooong time since I posted up here about all the reviews, interviews, featured bands, & such. That doesn’t mean, though, that we’ve been sleeping — not even a fucking hurricane can keep this li’l e-zine down, y’all. So, in the interests of letting y’all know about all the […]
It’s been a while, I know, since I posted an update up here (like, um, August?), but believe it or not, SCR hasn’t been asleep — even with Ike delivering the smackdown on Houston, we’ve kept putting up new stuff… I’ll hit the whole list soon, but the most pressing one’s the brand-new review of […]
Emerging from the “steam caves” and “swirling ice storms” of the Pacific Northwest come Lords of the North…wait, what? Steam caves? Ice storms? Wait, Iceland is part of the Pacific Northwest, right?…
My initial kneejerk reaction to Kingen’s Ride With Me was, well, pretty negative. I fully expected to be snickering within a few minutes of putting the disc in the player; I mean, Kingen (aka Torgny Karlsson) is a Sweden-born/-bred singer, pianist, and songwriter…
Back in 2004, three local Houstonians were fortuitously brought together in one of their personal homes to experimentally mesh their musical talents for the day. As a result, the band Jadewood was born, and the group has kept this name ever since then…
My life could be this band. No, really — listening to Evenstar’s Through the Seasons is like remembering what the long-dead band I used to be in sounded like in my head, before the involvement of actual people and instruments…
In the search for a photo of Blitzen Trapper, the first stop was obviously their artist page on Sub Pop. The tagline next to the Sub Pop logo read, “We’re not the best, but we’re pretty good.” Coincidentally, this is exactly how I feel…
I looked forward to giving another mindless modern rock band a literary ax-hug. I wanted to hate this album. I really did. But I just can’t. The only way to describe this album is as if the garbage that’s currently rotting in the airwaves wasn’t garbage…
Don’t let the cover of the Clash’s “White Riot” tacked on at the end of this album fool you; Room 101 is a far cry from ’70s-style punk. In recorded form, at least, self-described one-man-band Roburt Reynolds’ Room 101 project owes a hell of a lot more from late-’80s NYC noise-rock…
Race Bannon was the loyal “partner” to the unmarried Dr. Quest from the Adventures of Johnny Quest, but namesake band Racebannon is an Indiana band that has more mood swings than Britney Spears…
Reinvention is a bitch. I’m guessing the guys in Richmond, TX’s Mechanical Boy have been finding that out the past year or three. When last we saw (er, heard) the band, on their self-titled EP from a handful of years back, they were full-on members…
Again, we are all about the J.I.T. reviewing, and today is no exception… Just slapped up a review of Mechanical Boy‘s new album, Play Along, on the site, which is damned good timing considering that the Richmond-bred crew will be officially releasing the disc tonight, Fri., October 25th, up at Fitzgerald’s. The show was scheduled […]
The music on Forgot About the Whistle Industry starts promisingly, with distant, Radiohead-ish guitar and funky drums, but man, when guitarist/vocalist Jeremy Vanecek starts singing…it’s all downhill from there. It’s not the voice, mind you, but the words Vanecek’s singing that make me cringe…
There’s something warm and genuine-sounding about this disc that really gets me in those interior spaces I don’t think about too much most of the time. I mean, it’s hard to mine the roots-rock thing and not throw off a Mellencampian, small-town-homesick vibe…
My, how the mighty have risen. I remember seeing Flight of the Conchords at SXSW way back in 2006 and thinking to myself, “why am I the only one here?” Because there was literally almost no one at their shows…
Last-minute as always, but as of this afternoon there’s a brand-spanking-new review of the just-about-new album from local math-y, prog-y post-rockers Tambersauro, which is a lucky coincidence, since the band’s officially releasing the disc this very evening (Friday, Oct. 17th) up at The Mink. I’ve never managed to catch the band live, but going by […]
