I hope Lavar Burton broke some heads to get two-piece Reading Rainbow to change their name to Bleeding Rainbow. I hope Geordie LaForge and his milky white eyes was so pissed at the power-pop-punk noodling of this snappy little group, that he barged in to his manager's double-wide and declared that if he could do [...]
You'd think with their skull covered album, that Psychic Ills would be making more sinister, dark music. Maybe the '10s have taken back the skull as something beyond just a looming symbol of death, decay and abject terror, because from what I've heard, this second album from Psychic Ills is a pleasantly psychedelic bit of [...]
You can't, if you grew up in the wonder years of The Wonder Years, help but think that Cocktails' newest track "Hey Winnie" might be about Danica McKeller's iconic portrayal of bland-faced Winnie Cooper. And though, I can't find any actual evidence that Cocktails have some long term endearment for Kevin Arnold's lifelong paramour, the song [...]
Andy Human, solo project of Lenz lead-man Andy Jordan, feels as if it could be appropriate in a sequin covered leotard, a shiny onesie that prism-explodes laserbeams of light as the first spotlight hits it. Not to say that this is disco, or that is this late 70s dance music, oh no, this is punk [...]
It's the beginning of the year (it still is I swear) and I'm still sifting through the many, many Best of Lists that populated the web over the last two to three months. It's not say that I'm not actively searching for new music, but to be honest, the pickings feel slim, and someone(s) else [...]
Wet Illustrated new single "Scorpio Wings" has all the typical recipes for the old garage rock (are we still as critics allowed to call things "garage rock" in 2013?) - fuzzy guitar, adenoidal vocals, a boom-bap cavalcade of tightly strung snare. Maybe it's a new year, and the overwhelming weight of fuzzed out San Francisco [...]
Colleen Green is a magician, I swear to God, a magician with a bag of tricks that she bought at thrift store. The magic rings that you pull apart are all rusted; the rabbit is a dusty skeleton; the card set she bought is missing two fives and some diamonds. Yet she gets out there, [...]
The Men might have put out the best pure rock 'n' roll album of 2012. Open Your Heart is the kind of big riff, hard-charging, smart rock that we don't get to see very much anymore and to be honest, I was surprised that it came out of The Men's camp. Past albums from the group seemed [...]
The Bad Lovers, a trio of Austin rockers, could've been sucked through as seething time-space wormhole in to the modern day. Though the band looks like your more standard, hipster long-hairs, the sound they craft exists somewhere in The Beatles world pre-Revolver. Short, sharp bursts of twang brush nicely with the McCartney like vocals of [...]
Aquarium Drunkard, as I've said before and I'll say again, is a bastion of great music. Their end-of-year list is as comprehensive and interesting as any I've dug through. They somehow manage to cultivate a special little world that plays towards record collectors and fans of new music. On any given day you can meander [...]
Wooden Wand - 'Supermoon' from fire records on Vimeo. James Jackson Toth is the sort of prolific genius that you can get lost in. Just as soon you find yourself devouring his most recent record, he's released another, and then another and then another, each and all worthy of repeated listens. Don't even get me [...]
Matthew Houck I salute you. From the keening wail of Pride to the broken down Willie Nelson of To, Willie to the barroom backbeat of Here's To Taking It Easy he's defined and redefined and redefined his sound and never lost me along the way. Progress is the bane and the beauty of being an artist and only the [...]
Let's get the standard 2012 Holiday Cheer Finale out of the way: Happy New Year! To you, to yours, to any and all who might've stumbled across this website and this post as the New Year, lucky '13, crests on the horizon. What better way to start a new year but with a hint of [...]
I'm admittedly not a fan of the last Sonny & The Sunsets album. I've followed, with baited breath, each evolution of Mr. Smith's musical incarnation and the latest step down the path of my beloved country music just seems ill-fitting boring even. That said, Smith is an extremely talented, even prolific, musician and his, now, three [...]
The image of a man riding a bucking stallion on the cover of the new Parquet Courts album Light Up Gold is oddly fitting for this scrappy Brooklyn group. Not because there's even a hint of twang or country noodlin' in the music, but because there's a kind of energy coursing through every song on this [...]
Jozef Van Wissem and film director Jim Jarmusch supposedly met on a street corner when the albino haired director was seeking a, er, different kind of sound for his upcoming, hah, "crypto-vampire film." What came out of it was a musical relationship that's lasted three records and a slew of oddly titled performance pieces. Van [...]
Dead Luke returns! This time with a slow burner of a psych-jam that feels akin to the faded crushed velvet paintings of our collective youth. It feels like Dirty Beaches, from the "Slow Ride" days, got in with the bad kids from across the tracks, smoked a few too many happy sticks and decided to [...]
I don't know what a fist city is, but all of my images feel pretty wrong and awful and my therapist always says I should share the wrong and awful stuff, so here it goes: 1. A city where all the buildings aren't buildings but fists with giant meaty, sausage fingers. There's hair all over [...]
People's Temple return, 60s swagger fully intact. This go-around, and here's hoping the band catches the big-stage attention they so clearly deserve, the band dips the pinky toe in to the bluesier side of 60s, upping the rough-and-tumble quotient with gritty back-barroom riffs and a snappy backbeat. It's tight and nasty and a clear deviation [...]
Psych rock, at times, can be a pretentious mess of a genre. Too much noodling, too much "psych", just too much precious thought ladled atop a good old groundswell of rock 'n' roll. Pretentious, The Constants are not. This is big, fun, energetic psych-rock in the vein of Ganglians before they jumped ship to the [...]
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