Score: 5/10 . Wow, this Bandcamp stuff is getting so boring these days it almost makes me wanna stick some nondescript musical instrument into some random orifice on my body. K so I get wind of these big shots Pram who have been around forever, who are British and who no one has obviously heard […]
Score: 5/10 . Oxford Collapse guitarist/vocalist Mike Pace chimes back in this summer now for his band Child Actors’ second full-length, Smooth Sailing. And really, the title itself, apropos of how their other projects have been called “Best Boy” and “Get Soft,” encapsulates the crux of the problem with this album already — obstinate poppiness, […]
Score: 7.5/10 . Like The Smashing Pumpkins before them, Negative Scanner compose themselves of four Chicagoans, three guys and a girl, but this time, it’s some serious, nonplussed estrogen taking them helm at vocals (something largely unimaginable under the ham-handed hand of Billy Corgan, of course). And without a doubt, it’s the vocal chops of […]
Score: 9/10 . Wye Oak are an “indie” band, currently housed on time-honored Chapel Hill label Merge (which has bequeathed us Neutral Milk Hotel and Spoon albums over the years, to name a couple). The way I first discovered them was probably around 2012 or so, browsing for CD’s at my local library. So already, […]
Score: 8.5/10 . Submotion Orchestra is a seven-piece electro-pop project out of the UK now on its fifth album as a collective, calling to mind, probably, Florence + the Machine as the closest comparison point. And I was really trying to avoid listening to the new Florence + the Machine album, so I’m quite glad […]
Score: 4/10 . It’s always kind of depressing getting older and coming to the realization that people younger don’t really care about you, or anything else, for that matter. This was a theme in one Bukowski story, too, I recall: an author who like Odd-Future-offshoot beats-jazz revue The Internet originally hails from LA, in one […]
Score: 8/10 . Body/Head, Kim Gordon’s guitar/vox project along with fellow Massachusetts guitarist Bill Nace, is now on their third album, The Switch, although it seems you’d never know it from the indie and the music world’s relative ignorance of them. The Switch issues to us in July 2018 from Matador Records. As this is […]
Score: 3.5/10 . I think we were all blown away when this San Francisco band’s Sunbather album came out earlier this decade: it was death metal but it was so textural and cloaked in this psychedelic tinge that its stylistic rudiments almost seemed to dissipate in favor of its throat-grabbing knack for soundtracking all of […]
Score: 9.5/10 . Instrumentation would be one angle with which to approach this new Dirty Projectors album… in this department, David Longstreth and company (and he is a business, man, owning to more than 20 “Past Members” on Wikipedia) come at you with a couple of key adornments like this intensely funky electric guitar effect […]
Score: 8.5/10 . In a stroke of coincidence most eerie, you would have to admit, I am now for my second consecutive review handling an artist from the Virginian capital city of Richmond. Likewise, for the second time it’s a solo rock artist (this clearly isn’t the city of brotherly love), although this time the […]