With most artists, as they develop, their subject matter and the tone of their songs usually becomes more serious. Sam Beam, on the other hand, has taken the opposite path. The new Iron and Wine album, The Shepherd’s Dog, is actually less serious in tone than previous albums…
On Genuine Sense of Outrage, Oxnard, California’s The Warriors have let the Rage Against The Machine-isms drop (for the most part; there’re occasional throwbacks, like “Life Grows Cold”) by the wayside and have instead focused on straight-ahead metalcore a la Snapcase…
Update time, update time… This time out, we’ve got 2 things in particular that I’m very excited about. The first is a review (by yours truly) of the brand-new Linus Pauling Quartet CD, All Things Are Light. And while you should really go read the review for yourself, I can give you the upshot here: […]
First off, let’s agree that it’s dangerous to build a full-length album around a joke. Even when it’s a good one. Given that, then, it’s bound to be four freakin’ times as dangerous to build a four-CD box set (five, if you count the bonus Unplugged disc, which, ah, you really shouldn’t)…
Somebody somewhere is in their room with mt.st.helens’ latest CD Of Others just playing on repeat, and they’re thinking, “mt.st.helens is the greatest,” in typical cult follower, rabid fan fashion. And then they’re scratching their heads and wondering why the rest of the world isn’t getting it…
Tom Alford’s Second Foundation combines great beats and catchy lyrics with a rockabilly twist. This man definitely understands the meaning of a hook and doesn’t hesitate to use that knowledge. Alford gets our head bopping right from the start with “Yes It’s You”…
Okay, I’m impressed. With their second effort, Austin’s Meryll have created an album that serves pretty damn effectively as the soundtrack for an ’80s childhood, back when life still seemed innocent and free (to us kids, anyway) and you could roam the neighborhoods…
Yep, another week, another update — no new features this week, but we do have a fresh new pile of reviews for y’all, including yours truly pontificating on the 2nd full-length from Austinites Meryll. Who, I should say, not only happen to be really good in a catch-you-off-guard kind of way (I’ve had “Lightning Threatens” […]
The Alaskan youths of What Remains have put together some impressive songs on their debut full-length album Destroys All Monsters!. All DIY and recorded in one of the band member’s studio/bedroom, the CD shows promising music…
One of the reasons people buy music is to listen to it over and over, because it provokes an emotional response. Often that emotion isn’t even related to the song and is, instead, something that was attached to the song during a particular time and the sense memory of hearing the same sounds again…
The Flatliners are a Canadian group that plays ’80s-style punk, with some hardcore and reggae thrown in to change things up and the singer using that standard punk-style shout. They try to write big catchy melodies, but they fail more than they succeed, unfortunately…
Recorded in Brooklyn, Via is the only album The Wails will ever make, since they are no longer a band. Now, this is a relatively everyday occurrence in music. People get together, they mash up their ideas into a solidified medium…
Based on a cursory pass through Laced Up Tightly, it’d be easy to dismiss Schmaltz as just another indie-folkie left high and dry in the post-Lilith Fair America, but that’d be a mistake. Beyond the easy labeling, Schmaltz is a fine, emotive, heart-on-the-sleeve songwriter…
On their debut album, Epic Fits, PRE plays an abrasive strain of noise-rock that nonetheless still rocks. They play songs in post-Daydream Nation fashion, but with the energy of a hardcore band. The band uses two basses in addition to guitar, drums, and a woman having a fit…
It’s a weird thing to say, I know, but maybe it’s the throwback sound that shrouds all of Audio Postcard that keeps it afloat. I mean, if I looked at these songs as coming from just some random mid-tempo rock…
Damn, this is gonna have to be quick. We’ve got a bunch of new stuff up, two weeks’ worth (sorry, missed last week’s post), and there’s a ton of awesome, awesome shows this weekend, to boot, that I’m not really gonna have time to talk about… First of all, writer Peter (aka “Pedro”) did us […]
The school of “Quiet is the new loud” has become increasingly popular lately, having started with Nick Drake and continued through Elliot Smith to today’s artists like Jose Gonzales, but the genre unfortunately suffers from a lack of innovation — or, at least, the ability to make one song distinguishable from the last…
Verona Grove’s new EP of songs included on the recently released full length The Story Thought Over is pretty typical of recent releases in the modern radio-ready rock genre: it sounds great, great engineer, great mix, mastering, the songs are comprehensively written…
You can’t compare Sleeping in the Aviary to anyone, really. You could try, but by the time you explain yourself, a new song has started, and SitA sounds like something else. Oh, This Old Thing? is primarily a punk rock album, given to us in short bursts of uneven tempos…
“Thank you, Coldplay.”
“You’re welcome, No Second Troy”…
First off, I’ve got to give Houston garage-rockers The Monocles credit for knowing which the absolutely perfect song to start with. While all of the band’s brand-new 7″ is good, A-side “Out of Your Mind” is downright excellent, a door-kicking blast of streetwise rawk…
With a name that sounds like they should be either a ska band or a messy/chaotic noise band, on A Lesson in the Abuse of Information Technology Scranton’s Menzingers instead manage to craft a decent little chunk of bright Bay Area-style pop-punk…
I recently caught Jennifer Gentle live at the Proletariat. They sound nothing like their albums, and this is maybe a good thing. Radiohead does this, as well, with arrangements for live shows that differ substantially from their recorded music…
The Goods claim to be “post-grunge,” and I’ll be damned if Makin’ the Sound isn’t all that far off. There’s the sound, sure — the band resembles its grunge-y forebears in that the band members seem preoccupied with taking pretty melodies and dragging ’em through the mud(honey?)…
Back when I first heard Seattle quintet Aiden’s much-lauded debut, Our Gang’s Dark Oath, I had pretty high hopes. “Finally,” I thought, “maybe somebody can convincingly combine all that emo-modern-rock stuff with the kind of old-school gothiness the four ‘subversive’ kids who went to my high school…
Okay, so this is a little weird. Here you’ve got a band called American Steel, but almost every damn comparison I can come up with is to bands from the now-former British Empire. Like I said, weird. Large chunks of Destroy Their Future remind me strongly of oft-overlooked pseudo-punks New Model Army…
This CD made me want to punch myself in the face. There’s nothing in this little piece of plastic that remotely resembles anything new. I’ve heard this speak/yell aggro-punk stuff before in countless previous bands — Hot Water Music, Jawbreaker, etc…
Shangoband is a reggae group from Washington, DC. You’d think that being in Washington would give them no end of inspiration for songs, but unfortunately, inspiration can only take you so far. There are a few inspired moments on the record, but overall, it’s lacking…
For their second album, Qui were ballsy enough to ask David Yow to join the band. They must have been extremely excited when he agreed — Yow’s such a strong presence that it couldn’t not change the band. Bandmates Paul Christensen and Matt Cronk may be afraid of being overshadowed by Yow…
On Out of Our Mouths, Philly’s illuminea come off like three different bands all kind of playing in one room, like a bunch of friends who each have their own musical ideas and who’re all talented enough to play off one another’s songs…
Oh, baby, this is one hot smoking turd of an album. First of all, the press release for this “rock and roll” band touts the lead singer’s (John Cusimano’s) credentials as being “husband of talk show host Rachael Ray”…
Yep, got the update for this week up early, on account of two shows coming up quick-quick-quick fast (um, like tonight…). First up, Between the Buried and Me play this very evening, Oct. 2nd, up at The Meridian, along with Horse The Band, Animosity, The End, & Scale The Summit, and after hearing BTBAM’s most […]
Try as I might, I can’t dislike these guys. I’ve gotten a little tired of this whole style lately, just because it seems like every other damn disc I pick up does this same kind of Jimmy Eat World-style emo-pop — impassioned, sensitive-guy vocals, crystalline harmonies, and roaring rawk…
The album art for subHuman, the latest album from ex-Depeche Mode man Alan Wilder’s Recoil “project” after a six-year hiatus, is about as ill-suited to the music as it could possibly be. I mean, what are listeners supposed to expect when they see the blank, sleek parts of fashion mannequins…
Remember that one episode of Alf when Lynn got dumped by her rocker boyfriend or something, so Alf wrote her a song called “Out of This World” and they made a faux-music video to go along with it? Well, that has nothing to do with Canadian Gordon B. Isnor’s Creatures All Tonight…
At first, the music on Elcifasu’s album Supracenter Evidence of Palms sounds like an electronic composition. But when you listen to it, it sounds like much less than that. The band uses lots of electronically processed instruments and vocals and other sounds…
Back in the day, I can remember waging fierce debates over what was and wasn’t metal. Each of my friends had their favorites, naturally, and we all went back and forth over tempos, vocal styles, guitars, songwriting, the whole mess, and classifying some bands as being “real” metal…
Having had an extremely prominent ex by the name of Rachael (just in case you’re keeping score), I have to admit to some initial disappointment: despite the catchy name, the CD you (presumably) hold in your hot little hands does not detail…
Synergism, by Allene Rohrer, is a folkish record that rocks. It’s got more energy than you’d normally expect from a folk record, and the drummer rocks, which is something you don’t hear that often in folk music. But the songs are still basically folk songs…
If you dig this kind of modern screamo, guitar-driven, hook-laden rock, I Am The Pilot’s first album, Crashing Into Consciousness, is strong, if typical of the genre: well-executed, great-sounding, hooks galore. But what sounds like typical mid-2000’s rock on first listen…
