Score: 8.5/10 This is kind of a case of cordiality born out of an axe to grind, I have to admit. I’d been on the covert mission of exposing Sub Pop as an artistically vacuous enterprise, completely ready to write them off (and do so of all recorded music, in the process), when I came […]
Score: 3/10 LABYRINTHITIS certainly wakes on a pretty daze, I’ve gotta admit. The first track is this seven-minute, watery, translucent groove that seems just singularly tranquil and sublime, “It’s in Your Heart Now,” toting with it a multiplicity of synthesizer that gives the song a certain texture and musical depth. The problems start to arrive, […]
Score: 8/10 Midlake happens to be a band holding a somewhat special place in my heart, the reason being that I discovered them at one of those old CD listening stations in a thing called a “record store,” formerly a significant entity on ides other than “Record Store Day.” The album was The Trials of […]
Score: 8/10 Don’t do online research on anything. That’s my advice to you. Can you have a cookout? Do you have a grill? Do you have a badminton net, He**, a frisbee? The weather’s getting nicer. Simplify. Breathe. Gyrate. And listen to this fu**ing album because it’s the best jam rock album since Umphrey’s McGee […]
Score: 7.5/10 Michael Lane is your new soft rock radio, crooning out majestic, tranquil but aching songs drawing stylistic influence from Mumford & Sons and Bon Iver but always filling the mixes with an anatomical swagger of originality. Lyrically, he does a nice job of shifting topic too, letting existential philosophy and second-person rancor team […]
Score: 7/10 “Sea” is a funny word. This is especially true in the case of us Americans, who, as far as I know, don’t have access to anything officially classified as a “sea” anywhere on our contiguous landscape. The very mention of the term, too, seems to imply something grandiose and dramatic, such as mentions […]
Score: 8/10 Korn is still rocking albums out and you know what? You get down with your bad, funky self, Korn. You got a lot of us through some seriously sexually frustrated days in the late ’90s and for that we are eternally grateful. It’s pretty much always a spirited occasion hearing from you. I […]
Score: 10/10 One of my first impressions of this new album by Detroit’s blues-rockers The Lucid Furs was seeing this dude on some site list them as a “clone of Led Zeppelin, Blood Ceremony and Blues Brigade,” the person hence of course exhibiting a commendable ability to claim someone to be a clone of many […]