Tagged: marczgrub

Company of Thieves isn't a bad band. They've got the whole writing hooks, lyrics and catchy choruses bit down, but the fatal flaw is the band's radio-friendly sound...or really, their lack of any distinct sound at all. While the band is world's ahead of the vast majority of major label bands pushed on the airwaves, the indistinctive vocals, conventional production and lack of any real edge in the compositions keeps this band from qualifying as anything to really pay attention to. Competent, but not quite compelling is the best way to define Company of [...]

Why is it that everyone who wants to seem oh-so-idiosyncratic has to play a ukulele now? I know, it's not something you see too much in recorded music, but in the Toronto and Halifax music scenes, you see these guys everywhere. While everyone else can't seem to get enough of these goofballs, for this reviewer, enough is enough already. Enough has been enough for a while now. It's one thing to see these dumb kids writing their goofy songs about nothing and playing them on a ukulele to seem oh-so-quirky to the local hipsters, but it's another when they're [...]

Loney, Dear a.k.a. Emil Svanangen has put out one album every year since 2003…except for in 2008 when he just didn't. That's right. No album that year. What a lazy bum. All he does is sit at his computer creating music by hitting a couple buttons and singing into a little microphone from time to time and he can't even consistently put out one measly album a year. Dear Svanangen: you are not going to make it in this crazy town with such a laid back work ethic. (Sigh) Putting [...]

What if a bunch of goofy stoners put together a band, wrote wacky and spastic (but surprisingly good) songs about life and religion, and had a vocalist who sounds like Neil Young ? That would be The Flaming Lips , correct, but Everything, Now! also checks off all of the above without sounding anything like Wayne Coyne 's crazy crewpaloop (the Willy Wonka version of "possy"…copyright, by the way). Apparently there's room for two bands to hold up the wacky-philosophical-drugged-ou t-Neil Young banner. The difference between the bands, however, is that [...]

It seems as though ever since Alex Chilton wrote that classic adolescent-anthem "Thirteen", a select group of bands and artists have been trying to tap back into that sound and revel in the early-teenage innocence in which hand-over-bra is still a big deal and you have to sneak out of the house to suck face after dark. It's that beautiful twilight sound that's arguably served as the root of the entire twee-rock genre and inspired like-minded bands The Softies , Teenage Fanclub , and now The Color Wheels , to pursue the musical course of [...]

The Who liked to smash up hotel rooms. The Beatles liked to trip on acid. Mick Jagger and Jim Morrison were renown for their voracious sexual appetites. I'm lead to believe that I Am The Branch , however, likes to drink tea. That's all. No sex, no drugs, no rock n' roll because this is the most boring collection of songs ever written. Literally. Ambient music, drone experiments, pointless noise a la Metal Machine Music , hell, even John Cage 's "4'333 seems as exciting as a weekend in Vegas [...]

It's a cliché, but sometimes an album just speaks to you. Or, in the case of Neon Creeps , yells at you a lot. But that's the brilliance of O Pioneers! : these guys sing (er, yell) about real life; about meeting real life head on and how absolutely and insanely overwhelming it is. Over a charging hardcore backdrop, front man " Eric " (assuming he's the front man, as he's the one making the posts on their MySpace page) shouts out his frustrations with money, old friends, the city and the various problems that everyone deals with [...]

Some albums are a pleasure to listen to (as they're supposed to be). Many, however, are not. Clear the Tarmac , a comeback album of sorts from Sweet Water , a semi-grunge 90's band that was on hiatus from 2000-2006, falls into the latter. It's an album so methodically produced, shoddily written and moronically performed that it has no place existing in 2009, let alone in Sweet Water's 90's heyday. In addition to possessing the already stated qualities, Clear the Tarmac is an uninspired and stylistically-inconsistent mess on which the Sweet Water attempts to be all [...]

Oh man, Franz Nicolay is like the coolest dude eva. It's all about the mustache, and Franz has one hell of a mustache. It doesn't hurt either that he's the portly keyboardist in The Hold Steady , who've been steadily gaining popularity with plenty of support from Pitchfork and the blogosphere over the last couple years. On his first solo outing, Major General , Nicolay delivers exactly what's expected of him, but nothing more. His music has the same awesome pseudo-dramatic feel that his signature look has and it indeed is not a far cry from [...]

It's hard to place North Carolina's The Love Language within the current spectrum of indie rock in North America. They make no use of synthesizers, drum-machines or afro-beats. They're not introspective folkies, world-weary hipsters or symphonic maestros. In some ways their closest relative was Black Rebel Motorcycle Club circa Howl (their best album, for the record), as both share a love of the modern indie-alt-rock as well as old world Americana. If The Love Language's debut doesn't have quite the grandiosity of Howl , in nine songs that sound like they were recorded [...]

Mike Nau (of Page France ) began The Cotton Jones Basket Ride as a side project a while back but since his old band broke up it's been the object of his full-time attention. At his new day job, Nau writes songs that groove with a cool , soulful feel, though it never actually sounds like soul or R'n'B, even with the borrowed Motown template in which emphasis is placed on bass grooves supported by organ and occasional horns and strings. The shady, effortless cool of the songs make Paranoid Cocoon 's first five [...]

Whenever I see the words "bedroom recording," I get excited just at the prospect of being brought into such an intimate space. That's where the most interesting things happen, right? Most people were created on a bed, most probably die on a bed. Beds are where people dream, people fuck, people go to cry and write in their journal. Albums created in that space are special, and while I don't really know if Rosie and Me 's Swing Swing Demos were created on a bed or in a bedroom, they have that special, lo-fi, intimate feel as [...]

Many consider a career in the music business to be an escape from wage life. Apparently, the members of The National Rifle do not. On their debut EP Wage Life , The National Rifle string together songs of shoddily written and barely melodic verses, uninspired hooks and predictable choruses. Though it feels as though the band is really trying to seriously rock out, their songs at this point are too blatantly constructed . Each verse feels like a quick choice of chords for the singer (sounding like Joe Strummer [...]

I'm getting tired of bands like The Delicious . They're solid players, they write strong songs and they manage to fuse a diverse variety of influences into their own unique sound; what bugs me is that all they seem to want to do is goof around. Of course, it's no crime in rock to have fun and goof off and many would even argue that that's the essence and genius of rock. The Beatles , Bob Dylan , The Rolling Stones , The Who and scores of other bands that established the form and [...]

I'm getting tired of bands like The Delicious . They're solid players, they write strong songs and they manage to fuse a diverse variety of influences into their own unique sound; what bugs me is that all they seem to want to do is goof around. Of course, it's no crime in rock to have fun and goof off and many would even argue that that's the essence and genius of rock. The Beatles , Bob Dylan , The Rolling Stones , The Who and scores of other bands that established the form and [...]

• The Delicious - Suspended In Air

In Ayn Rand 's The Fountainhead , Howard Roark is an architect who designs buildings the way he sees fit. He cares nothing for the architecture of the past nor the desire of the masses for familiar structures. All through his life people tell him to give up and design the type of buildings people want to see, but he never does. In the end, he becomes the highest paid and most sought after architect in the city. Listening to Fall Out Boy 's Folie A Deux, I'm [...]

The Bodies Obtained really like their synthesizers. It seems as though nearly every sound on their debut album, From The Top Of My Tree , was created using a synth. Even the vocals have been heavily treated – Bowie -circa-Berlin-era-style - to sound just as strange and otherworldly as every synthetic sound present. Like Vangelis Papathanassiou 's Blade Runner score and Tangerine Dream albums, FTTOMT is a listening experience not unlike traveling through an alien landscape: strange and at times incredible. Unlike the aforementioned artists' [...]

Last week I made my top ten albums of 2008 list for my blog and posted it as a note on Facebook. My pick for ninth best album of the year was The Dears ' Missiles album. In the short explanation for the pick, I wrote "A darker, bolder set from these moody Montrealers, Missiles makes the bands previous releases seem like slick commercial pap in comparison to the seriously uncheerful vibes going around this flawed, but intriguing album." In the comments of the note, my friend and Boxes And Bags [...]

I'd like to send out a little notice to musicians everywhere. There's this thing going around right now called "Laurel Canyon Syndrome." Symptoms include steel-guitar cravings, warm harmony flashes and cowboy-boots-and-hat clothing attire sprouting from the feet and head. Lately such notable musicians as M. Ward , ( Feist producer) Gonzales , ( Broken Social Scene member) Jason Collette and David Vandervelde have come down with the sunny, laid back, California-circa-1970'-based virus and released albums reflecting its effects. Seems that Ben Kweller picked it up sometime this year as well, [...]

Skuffed Up My Huffy , Japanther 's 2007 album, is probably one of my favorite albums ever. Like the movie 300 or the Adult Swim cartoon Spaceghost Coast to Coast , Skuffed Up My Huffy was awesome simply because it was awesome. Its lo-fi production perfectly suited the drums-bass-synth-vocals get-up of Japanther and the campy little sound clips throughout made the album a beautiful pop-culture pastiche encompassing everything awesome about indie rock, lo-fi cassette culture (it lives on!...sorta…) and Brooklyn. Tut Tut Now Shake Ya Butt [...]