Score: 7.5/10 Anytime a rock album materializes that SOUNDS like a full band, but names as its moniker just one individual, “ego” and “hubris” seem like logical pejoratives to apply, a priori. Judging this music objectively, pretty much any listener would call album opener “All My Love” overly indulgent. The chorus is this long, awkward […]
Score: 8.5/10 Franz Ferdinand’s new album The Human Fear came with this tiny little press release, amazingly stripped-down and non-bombastic by this band’s standards. And, really, that’s what this album is like — it’s a pop-rock run-through, though not a terrible one, a reminder that this stuff is pretty much a museum exhibit at this […]
Score: 1/10 Camera Obscura were kind of the darlings of the indie scene circa 2007, with their breakthrough LP Let’s Get out of This Country still standing as a classic in cutesy, steel-guitar-laden folk-pop. In fact, this LP helped them score a big deal with Merge Records, judging by the concurrent events. And that, I […]
Score: 5.5/10 What started out in the 1980s as a half-demented pop foursome in Glasgow He**-bent on making your ears bleed with guitar feedback (infiltrated the mixes on infinitely catchy songs, curiously enough) is now just a duo, composed of original members and blood brothers William and Jim Reid. True to form, Glasgow Eyes is […]
Score: 10/10 One of the heartbreaking things to me about this new Black Keys release, Ohio Players, on which track one is entitled “This is Nowhere”; is that the Black Keys’ place of origin of Akron, Ohio is actually really beautiful. It’s located in Ohio’s Eastern half, among a copious litany of rolling hills and […]
Score: 9/10 In my review of Pearl Jam’s 2020 “effort” Gigaton, I made the remark that not only did it fall well short of standard, but it represented a time to hit the panic button — that to repeat the present error of forced, contrived emotion and reductive song structures would be essentially to kill […]
Score: 10/10 According to Wikipedia, “A la sala” is a Spanish phrase that Khruangbing bassist/vocalist Laura Lee would employ in her youth when trying to gather everyone into the living room. From this, we may be left, in our more licentious moments, to induce this album to be somewhat of a “crossing the Rubicon” signpost […]
Score: 8/10 For probably close to a decade or so, this band Elephant Stone has been like a dream to me. They would consistently pipe in with these deep, textural, moody indie rock songs, in the vein of Broken Social Scene covering The Stone Roses (from whose song their name springs), and the music would […]