Yep, got new stuff up this week, including one review for tonight, Sat., September 19th -- local psych-hop mavericks Ghost Mountain are opening for what promises to be a mind-blowing Devin The Dude show tonight up at the Warehouse Live, so we've got a review up of the band's most recent release, the VHS-only Summer Tapes.

If you caught Siamese Sailboats, you've already got an idea of the band's psychedelic/strange mashing-up of electro-pop, primary-color dance rhythms, and nerdy, halfway-confident rapping, and Summer Tapes doesn't stray too far from that musically, although the visuals are pretty damn impressive. The Warehouse Live show's a great opportunity for 'em, esp. considering the folks they're sharing the stage with -- Coughee Brothaz, Fat Tony, & DJ Meshak are all playing, too...

The Ghost Mountain guys may be kids, relatively speaking (I think they just started college), but the art they make, visual or musical, is unique and fearless. And good. Did I mention "good"? The full review's up over here.

Then there's Searching for Signal, who're similarly young yet just as accomplished in their own way. They've got a new EP out, It's So Bright, which takes the band's earlier stabs at indiepop and tosses 'em out the window in favor of delicate, ultra-gentle atmospherics. Think spacerock without so much of the "rock" to it, and you'll get the gist. (And again: good.) The band's playing Bohemeos on Sat., September 26th, so check here for the full writeup before then.

A little further out, writer Suzanne Ivey was kind enough to write up the almost-most-recent album by Fleet Foxes drummer (I think?) Joshua Tillman -- or "J. Tillman," or "Josh Tillman," whichever it is he goes by. She was pretty bowled over by the guy's well-thought-out, deeply spiritual songwriting, so we wanted to get the review up well in advance of his show Thurs., November 26th, up at what'll hopefully be the new Walter's. Full review here.

On the cinematic front, too, film writer Creg Lovett's been busy, not only throwing a timely review of The Informant! our way -- which, incidentally, makes me feel a whole lot better about the movie, because I've read Kurt Eichenwald's book, and it's not the slapstick romp you'd think from the commercials -- up over here, but also recruiting former Public News Music Editor Adam Woodyard to throw in a review of the re-released classic Guess Who's Coming To Dinner, which seems awfully good timing considering the current state of race relations in the country right now.

The review of the latter's up here, and it'll be showing at the MFA this Monday, September 21st. As for The Informant!, it's out in theaters as of yesterday...

Got a bunch more, too, like reviews of the new Placebo & The Guns of Detroit, among others, and a new (but very much belated) "Featured Band" writeup of American Fangs, who're utterly badass, I swear to God, and should be seen by everybody in the Universe. Seriously. The writeup's over here, and here's the whole pile:

Featured Bands: American Fangs

Reviews: Guess Who's Coming to Dinner; Ghost Mountain; The Informant!; Searching for Signal; Placebo; Joshua Tillman; The Guns of Detroit; The Nuclear Children; & Oh No Not Stereo.

More in the next week or so, so keep checking back...

Labels: Featured Bands, H-Town News, Moo-vies, Musical Crap, Reviews, Things To Do, Things To See

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I'd hoped to wedge this into the pile of reviews that went up late last week, but alas, it was not to be. Part of it, I'll confess, was due to my reluctance to bother even listening to Pete Yorn's latest album, Back and Fourth; fair or not, I tend to lump him into a pile of samey-sounding, guitar-/piano-slinging singer/songwriter dudes like John Mayer & Jason Mraz, all of whom magically seem to've appeared out of nowhere the last decade or so and about whom I'm generally meh.

With Yorn's latest, though, I'm slowly but surely being won over. He's gone a bit more country-folk this time out, at least when compared to his stuff from the Me, Myself, & Irene soundtrack and subsequent album Musicforthemorningafter, drifing out to Nebraska to record w/Mike Mogis and get all rootsy, and my apprehension aside, he makes it work to a surprising degree. The songs on Back and Fourth, which at first seemed fairly generic and dull, have steadily crept up on me, to the point where I find myself really, truly digging 'em, particularly tracks like the California-poppy "Paradise Cove," sweetly post-modern, Sun Kil Moon-esque "Social Development Dance" (is that actually where the term "social" for a dance-type party comes from, btw? if so, weird...), and defiantly unbowed opener "Don't Wanna Cry." Check the full review here if you feel like reading more ramblings from me on the subject.

Yorn's playing in town tonight, as well (hence my guilty rush to get this up today), up at The Meridian with somebody I've never heard of called Zee Avi (who's apparently originally from Borneo, which is intriguing). I'll grant his music may not be for everybody -- there are definite moments of Wallflowers-like Adult Alternative, to be sure -- but I'd recommend it.

New Featured Bands, Believe It Or Not: And as a bit of a side note, yes, I've added a couple more folks to the "Featured Bands" section, namely messy, noisy Pasadena rapper B L A C K I E and mathy, noisy post-rockers Tambersauro. Sorry it's taking me so damn long to update the Bands page -- it's just been hard to find the time, lately. I've got another dozen or so "Featured" people I want to get up there, and while I added some new band links to the "big" bands list today, too, I've got about three hundred more of those to add. Gah. Stay patient, y'all.

Labels: Admin Stuff, Featured Bands, Musical Crap, Public Service Announcements, Reviews, Things To Do

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Well, this is some good news -- I'd all but given up hope this last year or so of ever getting a chance to check out murky, bleak, indie-folk songstress Teresa M., aka georgia's Horse. live & in full color & all that. She plays really sporadically, even here in town, which is a shame considering how cool the gloomy, dirge-y, Appalachia-on-bad-acid, almost gospelized songs she crafts happen to be. I swear I've looked in vain to find anything release-like of hers for years, but never managed to get a hold of even 2007's "big" release Mammoth; a female Jandek, maybe?

But anyway, back to the good news: georgia's Horse. is apparently looking to go live somewhat, and wants to recruit some help:

Hi everyone!
georgia's Horse. (http://www.myspace.com/georgiashorse) is looking for some musicians (if you play and are interested, write) to help out on an upcoming European tour as well as a couple of shows here in Texas. I live in Montrose and have space to practice in my humble abode. If anyone is interested and would like further details, please contact cityofnosun through gmail.
Thanks and love,
teresa m.

Damn good news, and hey, there's an extra cherry on top -- Teresa/georgia's Horse. will be doing her/their thing in H-town in the not-too-distant future, playing a house show March 15th with fellow excellent songwriter Phillip Foshée, Buxton frontman's solo deal Cedar Boy Bailey, & quirkily entertaining folksters Sew What. The location's just given as "Palm Street", so you'll have to Myspace GH to find out the address & all.

So...any willing musician-like types out there ready to give it a shot? Drop Teresa a line...

Labels: Featured Bands, H-Town News, Musical Crap, Public Service Announcements, Things To Do

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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 pile with which we kick off the Big Oh-Nine, including Andrew's take on the epic showdown between the Guns N' Roses/Axl & Metallica "comeback" albums (here), my own much-belated review of Houston/Austin trio Woozyhelmet's freaking great magnum opus (here), newcomer Jessica's review of the Pale Young Gentlemen full-length (here), & a handful of other review-type things.

Plus, we've got two new live reviews up, one of The Supersuckers' most recent Houston appearance and one of Old 97's linchpin Murry Hammond's show here several months back (sorry for the delay, Peter!). Oh, and I've been doing a wee bit of updating on ye olde Bands page, which means there're nearly-brand-new writeups on The Tontons and The Mathletes up there. (More to come in that area, I swear.)

Here's the full crop this time out:

Live Reviews: The Supersuckers/Whiskey Boat; Murry Hammond/Tody Castillo/Arthur Yoria/Krista Vossler and Luke Kalloch

Featured Bands: The Mathletes; The Tontons

Reviews: Guns N' Roses; Metallica; Woozyhelmet; Pale Young Gentlemen; Seasick; Matt Duke; Strangers Die Every Day; Masks Phantoms; Northern Liberties.

More on its way later this month -- hope everybody had a good Christmas, New Year's, Hannukah, Diwali, Kwanzaa, Festivus, & whatever else!

Labels: Featured Bands, Live Reviews, Musical Crap, Reviews

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Back at the keyboard once again, post-Grand Canyon debacle (which I will post about, btw, for those who give a crap; still trying to organize thoughts & force myself to actually type it up), and we've got two updates' worth of new stuff up for all to ogle and admire and deride, as they/you see fit.

Anyway, first up I feel completely and totally compelled to mention that there's this badass show going on tonight (Tuesday, July 15th, for all the poor fools who have no calendars) up at The Mink's Backroom. Headliners are Sleepercar, which is Jim Ward's (ex-At The Drive-In/Sparta) new band, plus excellently awesome locals The JonBenet, Buxton, B., and -- most important to SCR at this particular juncture -- Giant Princess. We'd like to emphasize the coolness of Giant Princess specifically, esp. 'cause we just slapped a review of their free-to-all self-titled CD-R up on the ol' Website (courtesy of Jef "With One F" Rouner; thanks, Jeff!). No slight intended to any of the other fine bands playing, mind you -- we like The JB and Buxton a hell of a lot and have heard very nice things about B., too. It's just that being the ADD-addled people we (okay, I) are, we've gotta focus on what's in front of us, y'know?

Which means this coming Thursday, July 17th, leaves my little brain in twitchy, spastic overdrive. Because not only is Darkest Hour -- a fine, fine metalcore band from DC we here at SCR have been fans of for many moons (old-school interview Ruben did back in the day up here) -- playing that night over at Warehouse Live with At the Gates, Municipal Waste, & Toxic Holocaust (about all three of whom: sorry, no clue what they're like...), but the Free Press's Recession Thursdays thingy will feature mind-blowingly awesome local folks The Riff Tiffs as headliners, playing alongside Lisa's Sons, longtime fave Pale, The Takes, Come See My Dead Person, & DJ Ceeplus Bad Knives.

And just so you're not totally uninformed as to what's going on, we've kindly posted two reviews for you, one of the Riff Tiffs latest EP, festival/snflwr, which you can pretty much only obtain from the band themselves, so pester 'em if you see 'em (I was too slow last time, myself, and they'd already run out of copies) and one for Darkest Hour's latest, Deliver Us. There're other reviews up, as well, like writeups of the new My Morning Jacket, Gallhammer, No Age, Sigur Rós (oh, how I loathe formatting Icelandic characters in HTML...), Pomegranates, & others. Check 'em all out here

While we're at it, we've also got a couple of new show reviews on the site, writeups on the recent Her Space Holiday/Lymbyc Systym/We Were Wolves show at Walter's (here) and the not-as-recent Black Mountain show at The Meridian back 'round SXSW-time (here). We're very proud of 'em, and we're slowly, slowly catching up with the slew of show reviews our indefatigable contributors have been cranking out lately. Y'all do good.

Lastly (but certainly not leastly), yours truly has been finally attempting to rev back up again on actually updating the "Featured Bands" list -- I've kept a ton of deserving folk waiting in the wings for far too long to receive the dubious honor of having me blather about them on the Bands page. I'm working on rectifying that, so now you can read my quasi-insightful writings about local heroes By the End of Tonight, Deathbed Repentance, and listenlisten (sorry that one took so long, you guys!). More will come, I swear.

For now, here's the list:

New Featured Bands: By the End of Tonight; Deathbed Repentance; listenlisten

Live Reviews: Her Space Holiday/Lymbyc Systym/We Were Wolves; SXSW Spills Over with Black Mountain

Reviews: Giant Princess; My Morning Jacket; Darkest Hour; Pomegranates; I Love Math; The Riff Tiffs; Sigur Rós; Gallhammer; Jordan; No Age; Driver Side Impact; Hello Tokyo; Eric Layer; Little Name; Pain Principle; The Gena Rowlands Band; Jet Black Kiss; Juhu Beach; The Oswald Effect; & The Soulshake Express.

Enjoy it, folks, & come on back...

Labels: Featured Bands, Live Reviews, Reviews, Things To Do, Things To See

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Yep, got a bunch of new stuff up lately, including a nicely-sized (I think, anyway) pile of reviews. There's one of the new NOFX live disc, which is surprisingly good despite the title (these days I find myself blasting "You're Wrong" and "Franco-Unamerican" while driving around, at least as long as my daughter's not in the car), and the band themselves will be here in town on 2/26 at Warehouse Live with No Use For A Name, The Flatliners, and Houston's own resurrected pop-punk heroes the Latch Key Kids, plus an after-party with fellow H-towners The Hates. Gonna be good; check out the review here.

On top of that, naturally, we've got a good-sized pile of other reviews, including former King's X frontman dUg Pinnick (the capitalization's his, I swear, not mine), ASG, Emily Jane White, & ex-Casket Lottery/Small Brown Bike-ers Able Baker Fox, among others.

Oh, and I'd meant to post about 'em a long time before now, but we've now got some new Featured Band writeups up, for incredible local folks like Buxton & The Gold Sounds. Here's the whole pile:

New Featured Bands: The Riff Tiffs; The Gold Sounds; Buxton; & Latch Key Kids.

Reviews: NOFX; dUg Pinnick; ASG; Emily Jane White; Able Baker Fox; Plastic Idols; Patient Patient; & The Playing Favorites.

That's it for now. I'm gonna head to bed so I can wake up early & prepare my monkey suit for wearin' tonight. sigh.

Labels: Featured Bands, Musical Crap, Reviews, Things To Do

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Yeah, they're both a couple of days old already, but I just wanted to mention that fancy-shmancy new "Featured Band" write-ups are now online for sweet-voiced indie-popsters Piano Vines, who I'm eagerly awaiting to check out on CD (go, U.S. Postal Service, go!), and stoner-rock heroes and all-'round nice guys The Linus Pauling Quartet, who I'd been foolishly willing to dismiss 'til recently (yes, I am an idiot, and I'll admit that freely). More to come, I promise -- look for Rustler, The Riff Tiffs, Program, and a bunch more to magically appear here in weeks/months to come. Got my list, got my list...

Labels: Admin Stuff, Featured Bands

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Hey, folks -- longtime readers (yes, the few, the not-so-proud, the downright embarrassed...) will have probably noticed that the Featured Bands section of the site has been woefully outdated for, oh, about three years now (at least). 'Til recently, long-dead or moved-away folks like Middlefinger, Washington Westcott, & Panic In Detroit had been up there for a really long time, and the writeups for the still-around bands were definitely dated. (I think the Guilloteens' writeup mentioned their "new" album from 2004, Get Knifed, and said I hadn't listened to it yet, despite having reviewed the damn thing in the meantime...)

All of which, frankly, is pretty pathetic for a site that's at least partly about good music in this city of ours. Which is why for the past few days yours truly has been frantically updating & adding to the ever-popular Bands section of the site. Not only are there a ton of new band links, but there's also a decent-sized pile of new "featured" folks, and I've been working at updating as many of the ridiculously out-of-date writeups as possible and moving the ones that're dead & buried over to The Band Graveyard.

Anyway, head over & check it out if you feel like it -- there's more to come, definitely. I've still gotta do long-overdue writeups for Listen Listen, Free Radicals, Radio Pioneer, & a swarm of others...

New Featured Bands: Blades, Ryan Scroggins and the Trenchtown Texans, The Jonx, & The Phlegmatics.

Labels: Admin Stuff, Featured Bands, H-Town News

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Yep, new stuff up on the site, just in time for the end of May. Ch-ch-check it out...

New Featured Band: The Scattered PAGES

Reviews: Arthur Yoria; Land Of Talk; The Little Heroes; The Horrors; Sedalia; Sine Qua Non; Mick Sterling; & Tammany Hall Machine.

More to come. (No, really.)

Labels: Featured Bands, Reviews

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Gonna make this quick -- off to watch big Scotsmen/wannabe Scotsmen throw hammers & such and eat hard-boiled eggs that've been rolled in sausage and deep fried. Just so you know, though, today's update includes two bands playing this weekend: Alex Delivery does a psychedelic freakout thing tonight at The Proletariat (with Frog Eyes), and pop-punker-gone-acoustic Kris Racer will be up at Notsuoh tomorrow night rockin' on the Elliott Smith tip. Both will be real good, we swear...

New Featured Bands: Something Fierce; Co-Pilot

Reviews: Alex Delivery; Kris Racer; Hello Stranger; Alice Despard; Omar and the Howlers; & Sur la mer.

More very, very soon...

Labels: Featured Bands, Reviews, Things To Do

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Yep, new stuff for the new month, with more to come (hopefully very) soon. For right now, we've got a new featured band & some new reviews... Featured Band: Miss Leslie and Her Juke-Jointers. Reviews: Comeback Kid; local H-towners Ragged Hearts; The Comas; Analog Heartbreak; Sue Foley; Mess Up the Mess; The Sleeping (reissue); & Stemage.

Labels: Featured Bands, Reviews

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Man, what a week... It's fairly safe to say that things haven't gone quite the way I'd planned 'em. Seeing as this was shaping up to be one of the coolest weeks for The Rock here in Houston in quite some time, I'd hoped to be the music-fan-about-town. Screw SouthBy -- I figured a little Guilloteens here, some Blades there, plus some Jonah Matranga, all topped off w/some Palomar, maybe some Ladyhawk, and what the hey, some wild Irish fiddle, and I'd be a lot better off than if I were trying to negotiate the hordes of Sixth Street. I'm a married guy with a little midget at home, so I don't get to do this sort of thing real often; I was looking forward to it.

But alas, it was not to be. After spending last weekend nursing my wife and the munchkin w/no ill effects to my own health, I thought I was in the clear. I made it out to Walter's Monday to see the Fatal Flying Guilloteens (warning: do not view the site at work...) -- who I hadn't seen since Mike G. made the switch from drums to vocals, and I have to say that they get better every time I see 'em, amazingly -- and hang with out-of-town pal Conor, which was very cool, and got to re-meet the fabulous Ms. Rosa in person afterwards at Rudz. And hey, no cops raided Walter's, at least not while I was there, so that's a bonus.

I stuck around Walter's after the Guilloteens long enough to catch part of Iron Age's set, which wasn't bad, I'll grant, but mostly got me desperately needing to rip my Metallica CDs onto my iPod. And it was good to say "hey" to Mike and Shawn G. once again, even if Shawn thought I'd left town a while back to go to school up in Denton. Ah, well; better than dead, I guess, and I had a damn good time, all things considered.

Tuesday was equally a blast, at least at first. I swung up to Super Happy Fun Land in the pouring rain to catch Jonah Matranga and hang out w/friend Mel and his crew, all of whom happen to be the coolest folks. After a truly, truly bizarre, halfway-hysterical set by a SXSW passer-through named Toof who did things with a bass guitar, a keyboard, and an iMac that I still can't entirely comprehend (and if I could remember more of the lyrics to "Just Give Me Anal In the Morning, Baby," I would, but then this site would probably be blocked from every high-school PC in the known universe, if it isn't already), Jonah took the stage and played low-key balladeer to all us emo-kid types.

He played some new songs he's been working on, and they blew me away -- at one point I caught myself thinking, "oh, yeah, that would be great on a mix...no, wait, maybe that one..." The high point, though, was him acceding to audience demand and rocking out (acoustically) "We Had A Deal," off The Volunteers. I've never seen somebody so happy to hear the crowd singing the words louder than they were in my life (actually, that kind of thing's usually just uncomfortable and weird).

Afterward, I caught a bit of Barbez's set -- liked the klezmer-sounding songs, not so big on the rest -- and then headed for House of Pies w/Mel, Jonah, and two Jonah fans/friends whose names I'm utterly and completely blanking on (sorry, ladies; my memory of the evening is hazy). Sure, I was up way, way, way late on a work-night, but I couldn't pass up the chance to cap the show w/some chocolate cream pie.

Unfortunately, nature had its revenge on me, later that night, and by morning I was thoroughly miserable, sick, and exhausted. And I've been fighting this goddamn flu crap ever since. Profuse, profuse apologies if anybody I ran across/into, esp. at SHFL (which is, by the way, a very cool place to catch a show), is now sick thanks to my plague-infested self. I am really sorry, even if you cut me off on the freeway home or something; I wouldn't wish this on anyone. I don't remember anything of Wednesday, and was so out-cold I couldn't even make it to the Palomar show, despite their album being utterly great. I spent the next two days feeling up and down, and now it's St. Freakin' Paddy's (okay, it was, about 20 minutes ago), and I'm so sick I can't even knock back a celebratory glass of Jameson's. Fuck.

Ah, well. On the plus side, there's still time to check out one very-very-very cool show tomorrow, er, today (Sunday, 3/18, that is) -- Winterpills are playing at Last Concert Cafe with a bunch of local folks (Carrie Ann Buchanan, Dave Fahl, & a few others I can't remember). And because we here at SCR would like for this little e-zine to be at least a relatively-current proposition, we have -- lo and behold! -- put up a review of the new Winterpills disc, The Light Divides, in time for the show. Read the review here, then check out the band; they'll be good, honest.

And hey, while we're at it, we've also updated the Bands page slightly to include screamo/loud-and-noisy/whatever-core heroes The JonBenét. Enjoy; more updates to the horribly-outdated Featured Bands to come soon...

Labels: Featured Bands, Pseudo-Reviews, Reviews, Things To Do

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Yep, new stuff up for the new week. Featured Bands: Sharks and Sailors; The Western Civilization. Live: DragonForce. Reviews: Loney, Dear; Die Hunns; The Jonx; Lucas Cates; Sebadoh re-issue; Teenage Harlets; tvfordogs; & Mike Uva.

Labels: Featured Bands, Live Reviews, Pseudo-Reviews

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Damn. It really feels at times like I've neglected the Houston "side" of Space City Rock for the better part of five years now. And that sucks. Nobody to blame but me, unfortunately -- with the house, the wife, the kid, and the attempt at making the e-zine "side" of the site work like, well, a real e-zine, I've tended to shove the Houston stuff aside.

The result of that is moments like last night, when I was going through the Bands page of this site, and I kept hitting little bits of various band blurbs that made me spit out my soda and yelp, "What? how fucking old is this?" And yes, it really has been that long since some of those writeups were updated, to the point where I ended up moving Los Skarnales, Panic in Detroit, and Sore Loser all over to the Band Graveyard. Sad, sad, sad, I know.

On the positive side, I added the first two "new" bands to the Featured Bands section in quite a while: Georgia's Horse and Mansion, to be specific. I've only relatively recently heard either band (hard to believe, really, given how long Mansion's been slugging it out in the scene; sorry, you guys), but they've both knocked me over in a big, big way in a pretty short amount of time. If you haven't seen/heard them already, you really, really need to. Seriously.

At any rate, this hopefully will signify me turning over a new leaf for the "locals" part of SCR. Keep an eye on the Bands page, in particular, 'cause I'll be attempting to add a bunch more deserving local heroes to the list in the coming days...

Labels: Admin Stuff, Featured Bands, H-Town News

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