You ever have one of those moments where you look at the person next to you, speechless, and with a “…the hell?” look on your face? Well, that’s my exact reaction to hearing Doubting Thomas, by T. Hallenbeck. I’ll admit it — I am a “Rennie,” a Renaissance Festival devotee…
On Burning Off Impurities, their fourth full-length release, the reticent Portland quartet Grails take post-rock to its logical extension, removing the rock from their music almost entirely in favor of a loose assemblage of folk sounds backed by a conventional drumset…
Teenaged-boy angst is nothing new; heck, it’s been sung about for as long as there’ve been instruments, I’m sure. With Goodbye To The Gallows, though, it sure feels like Emmure’s put somewhat of a new spin on the idea. For one thing, I’m pretty sure I’ve never heard songs of bitter recrimination and youthful agony…
Avagami doesn’t play typical rock — few bands put keyboards in the foreground as much as these guys do. This Chicago duo doesn’t even use a bass on their debut album, Metagami. And the only “real” instrument here is a saxophone…
Here’s the thing: I loathe country (well, most of it, anyway), but ever since my friend Ben got me listening to it in college, I like bluegrass. While the lines between the two often blur, admittedly, this probably partly explains why I find myself liking Richmond, Virginia-dweller Josh Small’s new album…
This little five-track disc seems to encapsulate the previous year of Michael Massimo’s life. According to the press release, he set his own car on fire with himself inside. I do not know how that is even possible outside of a Jackass video, but anyway…
Hollywood Black is a Christian rock band, although reading their interviews and listening to their lyrics might lead one to believe they conflicted about their faith. Is their first album Two Thousand Years Of Progress meant to be ironic, or a warning, or is it really meant to be introspective?…
Yep, more stuff up for Sept. — this time out we’ve got a little pseudo-interview/preview of electroweirdo Dan Deacon, who’ll be playing this next Monday, Sept. 24th, up at Walter’s on Washington, plus a live review of the recent pre-Labor Day show at The Proletariat with Buxton, Digan, The Church of Philadelphia, and Hollywood Black. […]
I can’t help but feel a little bad for Raze to Ashes. They’re clearly trying to get you to bang your head and shake your first in the air with this 4-song EP, but it’s just not going to happen. Sure, the band is technically proficient, but they lack even an ounce of creativity or originality…
Anyone starting a listen of X27’s Antilove at the logical place, the beginning, could be forgiven for underestimating the Brooklyn trio, as opener “Da-Na-Do” is the worst song on the album by a long shot. The band spends a lot of time walking the razor’s edge…
Tiny Vipers is the nom de plume of Jesy Fortino, a singer-songwriter from Seattle. Hands Across the Void is her first full-length album, the focus of which is on her voice and acoustic guitar, but that doesn’t mean it’s folk music…
Something about Slider just doesn’t sit right with me. Maybe it’s the “post-grunge” phenomenon — they remind me a lot of bands like Fuel, Oleander, 12 Stones, or Our Lady Peace. For the most part, that’s not necessarily a good thing…
It’s a shame these guys — okay, “guy”; apparently there used to be an actual band, but on At the Poles, Seven Storey Mountain is Lance Lammers playing pretty much everything — have gotten lumped the past in with that whole emo school…
Yeah, I just can’t seem to escape it lately — metal’s come back into my musical world, and in somewhat of a major way. It’s like slipping back into any addiction, I suppose: you promise yourself that it’ll definitely only be this one thing…
Don’t you just hate Fallout Boy? The way they prance around like they started a scene or something. Their overproduced music, their annoying fan base, their god-awful music videos. Fallout Boy is the sad product of dying trends and a mix-up of poorly-made emo slop…
Mick Harvey, the once partner of Mr. Nick Cave, was the second half of Australian noiseniks, The Birthday Party. Two of Diamonds, the latest release from Mr. Harvey, is a long way from those Birthday Party days. Yeah, there’s a musical maturity…
Bear Claw is a Chicago-area band that uses two basses instead of the standard guitar and bass lineup. This gives them a different kind of sound. However, they usually use one of the basses like a guitar (including the distortion pedal), so it’s not quite as different as you might expect. Their sound borrows a […]
You’d think with an album title like Illicit Hugs and Playground Hugs, you’d get rock songs about bar fights or running from the cops. Instead, The Basement gives us alt-country fare with vague songs about our women and our melancholy, boring lives….
I challenge anyone to put Bad Brains’ Rock for Light and I Against I next to Metallica’s Kill ‘Em All and Ride the Lightning, and then explain why the latter are megastars and the former spent the better part of 25 years in near-obscurity…
I have a really hard time writing about comedy. It’s not that I don’t enjoy it, but just that it’s not my “area,” so to speak. I’m a music guy, not a comedy guy, and believe it or not, there are rules to both — and if you don’t know the rules to something…
Southern California hipsters have been flogging the roots-rock idiom since at least the mid-’60s, when every third musician who rolled out of Laurel Canyon and onto the Sunset Strip had an acoustic guitar and a song to sing. The golden age of this stuff happened in the seventies…
Just a quick little update-time post… First off, tonight at Walter’s on Washington, excellent nu-yallternative folks Oakley Hall is gonna be rockin’ the house (gently, mind you); I’ve heard their new album, I’ll Follow You, and I think it’s damn fine, but former expat Houstonian Justin has a more in-depth review up on the site […]
If you’re into different styles of music rolled into one album, then you will definitely fall for this band. Teedo, which is made up of Teedo Bilecky (lead vocalist), Saeko Terano (keys and backing vocals), and Oweinama Biu (bass and backing vocals), have recently released their first full-length…
More than thirty years into his career, Glenn Mercer (best known from the Feelies) has released his first solo album, Wheels in Motion. Most of the people he recruited to play on the album are former Feelies, and as a result the album sounds a lot like what the Feelies might sound like…
Yep, just a couple more things up before I head off to wander the fjords and freeways of Scandinavia, in search of traces of my wife’s Viking forebears — as of this AM, we’ve got up a cool, cool review of the Battles/Ponytails/Sharks and Sailors show in town a month or so ago (give or […]
I honestly didn’t figure it’d ever happen. Once Weezer bassist Matt Sharp’s side project-turned-fulltime gig The Rentals faded from view, I assumed, somewhat sadly, that, well, that was it. Return of the Rentals was the tongue-in-cheek…
Have you ever taken enough Tylenol PM to become drowsy, but not enough to kill the throbbing pain between your eyes? That’s pretty much what listening toThe New Ancients feels like. Oh, don’t get me wrong…
Miracle Mile is a musical enigma. One listen to their latest release, Glow, makes you wonder if you’ve stumbled across an untapped musical gem or if you’ve just spent the last thirty minutes listening to lyrical Muzak…
The Pacific Northwest was such a mecca for churning, powerhouse guitar rock in the ’90s that it seemed to have completely switched gears in the following decade. But it didn’t really happen. Watching the likes of Death Cab, Modest Mouse, and Minus the Bear rise in popularity…
I needed a CD to both fall asleep and wake up to. I have a feeling Ilad’s National Flags would give me nightmares, though, as dark and ambient as it attempts to be. I remember once I fell asleep to Wilco’s A Ghost is Born…
Alright, so I’m pretty favorably disposed, these days, to any band that can do the D.I.Y. thing, no fancy-shmancy computers and whatnot involved, and pull it off. Oddly, I’ve found myself yearning for the days of hand-cut 7″ sleeves…
Speaker Speaker is a three-piece post-punk band from Seattle. The band’s style is very much within the ’90s post-punk template, but being in the tradition isn’t a bad thing if you make it interesting, which they do…
This is almost too easy; it’s like eating my favorite candybar, seriously. I’ve been impressed as hell by local punk kids Something Fierce since I first caught their full-length effort, Come For The Bastards, but the blazing rawk fury…
With sounds as elusive as their whereabouts, The Sleeping Pimps strut their way through their first self-produced, three-song EP. The Sleeping Pimps is a flashback to the days of free love and flower power…
At times, Plague Park, the debut album by Handsome Furs, sounds almost untouched by human hands. That seems a strange thing to me, as I find a close affinity between this album and Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska…
Guff has a remarkable ability to turn gold (well, okay, aluminum) into lead. On their album Symphony of Voices, they take every possible opportunity to screw themselves over in the studio. Their melodies are inoffensive…
Okay, first things first — tonight local indie-oddballs Bring Back The Guns are playing up at The Proletariat with an extremely weird/freaky/etc. band called The Show Is The Rainbow, and going solely by my repeated listenings to the not-yet-officially-released (October’s when it drops, I believe) BBTG disc, Dry Futures, it’s gonna be a badass show. […]
Do you like your beer cold? Do you like your chicks hot? Do you like to pump your fist out the window of your bitchin’ ’79 Camaro when Judas Priest comes on the radio? If you answered “yes,” to any of those questions…
This pop-rock female songwriter, producer, and collaborator (wow, that’s a mouthful) hails from New Jersey, and the first time I listened to Deb Ferrara’s album, Anything But Ordinary, I was a bit skeptical…
It only takes about the first five seconds of the first track of their it’s-been-fuckin-long-enough-y’all debut CD, “No More Good Songs,” for Houston indie-rockers Bring Back The Guns to demonstrate why they regularly top local critics’ lists…
