Um. Whoa. I just finished listening to Guardian Alien’s new full-length, See the World Given to a One Love Entity, and I’m feeling a little overwhelmed, to the point where my head’s still spinning somewhat. Give me a second…
Argh. Dammit, scrambling again, on Day Four (Monday, March 12th, to be precise) of SXSW Overflow Fest over at Super Happy Fun Land. sigh. I swear, one of these damn days…
Yep, it’s Saturday now, February 18th, and the weekend rolls on; there’s a crap-ton of cool things (well, what I happen to think are cool things, anyway) going on this evening, so get ready to dodge the torrential downpour & get out there…
Listening to Future Islands’ Undressed EP, I feel like I’ve inadvertently walked in on a weird scene in a dimly-lit, avant-garde coffee bar somewhere in the dingy, half-arty part of a city that’s not this one but is perhaps cooler, or more pretentious…
The Fiery Furnaces’s eighth album, I’m Going Away, is their rock album — it’s much more linear and stripped down than their previous records, with much less of the crazily proggy stuff. The record is for those people who wish they’d cut out that wanky prog stuff and just rock…
Tortoise wasn’t the first band to receive the “post-rock” tag, but over time they’ve become its most lauded and recognized practitioner. As the term becomes increasingly associated with the crest-and-valley dynamics and soporific emotional outpourings of guitar-based bands…
I can’t entirely put my finger on why, but it always seems to take me quite a while to fully wrap my head around an Arbouretum album. With 2007’s Rites of Uncovering, I found myself compelled to listen and re-listen and re-listen to the disc…
Want some punk for the masses? Blasphemy! Go buy some Green Day if your stomach can’t handle real punk. If you get tired of all the hate and madness, however, Double Dagger’s More is much easily digestible. What you get, instead of the routine “I hate George Bush,” “government oppression”…
As the first raw, lava-lamp guitar chords of “Laywayed” rolled forth from my headphones, my first thought was that if this CD was about twice as long, it would be great to listen to it on acid. It wasn’t long, however, before I was forced to reconsider…
Pyramids is Pit er Pat’s second full length album. It was recorded essentially live by John McEntire, whom you may know from such hits as Tortoise and The Sea and Cake. If you like the post rock sounds of either of those groups, you might like Pit er Pat…
ADULT. is a duo from Detroit (Adam Lee Miller and Nicola Kuperus) that, appropriately enough, plays electronic music. ADULT. recorded Why Bother, their fourth album, after a third member left the group. Their beats use lots of distorted keyboard and synth loops…
It’s funny, but while Arbouretum’s “Pale Rider Blues” swipes the title of a classic Eastwood flick, it sure as hell sounds like the band picked the wrong one to swipe from. This is far closer to High Plains Drifter, for my money…
Bobby Conn’s latest record, King for a Day, satirizes movie stars, musicians and other celebrities amid so-bad-it’s-good commercial radio production…
A common term used to describe the music of A Minor Forest is “math rock.” Apart from the fact that this term has been applied to numerous bands that have vastly different styles, I dislike it because it implies that all math is identical. Which, is of course, ludicrous…
