July 2009
2 posts
Opus epic
“But smoke speaks of fire and the five-headed phoenix Zounds is Dappled Cities’ masterpiece, a sophisticated, grown-up opus epic. Lyrically it’s introspective, full of the unusual, but wonderous, Dappled metaphors. But it’s also a big, deep muscular album. Zounds opening salvo ‘Hold Your Back’ is the most adventurous track of the band’s career – a deep, brooding magnificent bastard anthem...
Hilarious regularity
“Influences as disparate as the Band, Randy Newman, Carlos Santana and Spank Rock inform the soundscapes, but the vibe is too coherent to be called eclectic. Technicolor Health invokes the synthesized Latin percussion that plays outside the band’s apartments every night as they’re trying to fall asleep, and the classic rock radio they listen to with hilarious regularity.”
March 2009
4 posts
Contemporary sonics
“Much like Blur fused English pop traditions and contemporary sonics to forge Brit Pop, Harlem Shakes meld the Great American Songbook with unmistakably contemporary textures, creating what one might call “Am Pop.”….Above all, the album is about surviving abject shittiness. But it’s also about what new-wave bands and new-wave revival bands call, “modern...
Distinct brand
“Rhino Bucket once again delivers their distinct brand of three chord boogie rock n’ roll unlike any other on their latest release….”I always come back to the rock. Maybe I’m just a one trick pony, but I really like the trick I know.”“
Maybe one day
“It was just last year that married couple Thomas and Dede informed Darren about the name of a new band they’d created and as Darren says “basically on the strength of the name I was like right I’m in!” Indeed he is not the only one, the Guardian and NME recently wrote about how brilliant the title of We Have Band works, with the former discussing all possibilities of franchising the We Have...
Funny exercise
“”Traditionally, a haiku poem is a seemingly insignificant observation about the natural world that unfolds into an epiphany concerning some larger mystery,” he continues. “I thought it’d be a funny exercise to imagine a poet in an environment like a movie theatre that demands nothing of his imagination, that forces its own hyperactive images and observations onto...
February 2009
3 posts
Enthusiastic
“Hello, I’m a Japanese girl loving pop music. I always introduce the artist whom I liked.
Recently, I discovered the British pop indie band, “Burgess & Maclean” which is very catchy while being enthusiastic.
I wanted to tell this to the person who seems to like such a music and sent this message.
In their Official Site, you can Free Download their All ALBUMS!”
...
No Sugar Ray
“As FHM says, “There’d be no Sugar Ray, Nine Inch Nails or Robbie Williams without these boys.”“
Lonely swirling 20s
“She hummed her way through folk music camp, through Smith College and a theater degree, through anarchist puppet training, through brazen, all-women a cappella singing, through heat rash in Kenya, through deeply scrutinized puppet performances in Europe, through her lonely, swirling 20’s. The hum seems to have become a yell.
In 2008 she released BiRd-BrAiNs, which she had recorded...
January 2009
3 posts
Even we don't understand it
“Krishna… moved here from southern India, at the age of 5, with his entire family. It’s an East-meets-South thing…even we don’t understand it. You’d have thought we’d gravitate toward a guy who could play a good shuffle, but instead we drifted into an unknown polyrhythmic universe.”
All binded
“indeed, it is easy to say that life is a constant flow of beginnings and ends, inhaling and exhaling, rising and passing. well, the morning after girls’ voice remains steady and stronger than always, and as you join them on this journey, you will see that there is not a call, nor text, nor an email that you need to attend to. there is simply the true presentation of the bond between...
Rap vixens
“I could tell you that we chose the song because of our affinity for electronic beats, hand-claps and internationally acclaimed rap vixens (is Lil’ Kim internationally acclaimed? Does Canada count? Could you classify M.I.A. as a “vixen”?), but then I’d be lying. We chose the song because it samples “Straight to Hell” by The Clash, which Mike and I have...
December 2008
10 posts
Cocaine is an issue
“I hope you feel that cocaine is an issue that is related with pop culture, I enjoyed your link-to the alien blinking. Your blog gets some good comments… Several films follow the impact cocaine has on those whose lives it touches. All these videos are now available on the Youtube channel. I think that this video featuring a singing bag of cocaine may interest you the most.”
Confound the expectations
“In an effort to further confound the expectations of those around the band, they chose to have their video directed by someone who had never helmed one before…”
On the surface
“Jeremy has also held a special fascination to strong ’50s Rock n’ Roll sensibility; Buddy Holly is one of Jeremy’s favorite singers along, with Richie Valens and ’60s era Yea-Yea Francois Hardy. On the surface, his performances seem like that a pop singer: dancing, singing and playing guitar. Yet he’s so illusive. If you reach out to grab him you wouldn’t...
Gem of a musical rabbit
“Gentleman Auction House pulled a surprise holiday gem of a musical rabbit out of their pop laden/heart on sleeve hat a few weeks ago … by officially putting out their new Christmas In Love EP! So rock out, put down your pen and just listen and enjoy for the sake of enjoying for a second – hopefully it will be enjoyable?”
Imagined teenage perspective
“Seeking fans of both Justin Timberlake and Merzbow, Poptastic is “just plain wrong.” Fitzpatrick assembled Poptastic as a coed “boy-band,” conjuring the spirit of Lou Perlman, who manned the helm of the millennial teen-pop wave. Accordingly, Fitzpatrick wrote and performed pop music and enlisted random friends to sing the sappy break-up-to-make-up lyrics he wrote in an imagined teenaged...
Free
“Special offer foGet a free Review In one of our blogs. labels inquire.”
Stretched the spectrum
“Who Are Tab the Band? It sounds like a real band using real instruments recorded in an organic way. On this second release, the guys stretched the spectrum, some songs heavier and some more poppy.”
Rock zealots
“It’s not everyday that an underground NYC band is branded with the stamp of approval by rock zealots such as Alan Moulder but BM LINX, with their infectious style of beat-driven electro rock, have managed to do just that and much more. The famed British alternative rock record producer discovered BM LINX while passing through NYC and immediately fell in love with the glittery and...
Social dinner experience
” “Wine” & “Dine” inside (outside) one of Miami’s most lavish restaurant & lounge venues while listening to your favorite R&B/Old School hits. Tuesdays’ is a place for the mature and trendy to mix and mingle with trendsetters and tastemakers from all over the world… L A V I S H an R&B Social Dinner Experience Each and every...
Welcoming familiarity
“Exuding welcoming familiarity from the very first listen without ever sounding derivative…shifting from Smiths-esque guitar stylings to driving, hook-laden indie rock and country-tinged indie pop, often during the course of one song.”
November 2008
19 posts
Timelessly inventive
“They entice you to leave behind limited conceptions of self and music. Astronauts of Antiquity invite you to celebrate life in a deeper sense. Everything else can wait. Musically, they are a futuristic travelog that elucidates the past. India’s hauntingly beautiful vocals spiral around B. Rhyan’s timelessly inventive rhythms. Their vision is to offer up the ancient on a modern...
Finally
“Much can happen in a decade. Political upheaval, collapse of the free world, a decade of debt, eco-socio warfare, wack emcees bite and blow-up, and the planet might finally understand Anticon.”
If anything
““I’n The Air Tonight’ is probably the darkest, and weirdest, tune Phil Collins ever wrote. The structure of the song allowed us to drop some of our own atmospherics onto a song already rich in atmosphere. If anything, we feel guilty about not feeling guilty about liking this song.”
Sometimes you need
“It’s been said that to write a decent pop song, all you need is three chords and the truth. But as pop music’s brief history has shown, things aren’t always that simple. Sometimes you need to smudge the truth a little to get your point across; sometimes you need more than three chords. And sometimes you need a glockenspiel, a Suzuki Omnichord, and a Tennessee high school...
Vibrant mohawk
“Their progressive swagger and throwback fashion sense may initially compel comparisons to “hipsters,” but the duo’s truth is at once more complex and far simpler: Y-O has been sporting a vibrant mohawk for going on five years while Thurz notes that the group is innately fashion-conscious and not willing to sacrifice substance for style. Y-O explains, “What duo out of Cali you know looks...
New
“WE HAVE A TON OF NEW WRITTERS OVER HERE AT THE PUBLIC ACCESS STATION”
Beast
“The local press were there and called them “a crazy electro ruckus,” a “hedonistic roughed up take on disco,” “sizzling,” and a “three-headed electro-rock beast,” even though there are four of them.”
A woeful misstep
“Speaking through actions is traditionally the task of self-assured, moral men adhering to a higher standard than lip service. Applying the same status to a rock-n-roll band is a woeful misstep but, at the same time, there is a similarity in the self-assurance it takes to maintain an instrumental rock band these days.”
Couldn't say no
“Luckily for all of us, icy Canadian spacerockers Faunts have a lot of friends. And when a bunch of those friends came on board to offer their own remixes and interpretations of Faunts’ cinematic and ethereal music, they couldn’t say no.”
Blessing and curse
“Overtop a rhythmic foundation laid down by drummer Michael Fadem, Josh Abbott and Holly Miranda’s buzzsaw guitars carom and careen against Alex Lipsen’s square wave synths as their voices duet and duel overtop in tones that are playful and plaintive, menacing and mesmerizing. The Jealous Girlfriends have already achieved a tremendous amount for a wholly independent band, earning...
Epicenter
“For guys at the epicenter of so much music-world chatter, Seth and Scott Avett sure spend a lot of time ruminating gently on the nature of memory.”
Trying his best
“Luke is not so much concerned with hidden worlds but with the landscape of the one around us. The concrete world is a series of relationships. Form is established by its relationship to empty space. There will always be tension and release in an unending line as long as there is no border. Life surprises most of us, we can never see its composition, our birth is one side of the frame and...
Credit-crunching
“Honey Ryder are a band who know a bit about economics. Guitarist Martyn Shone used to be a banker in the city and has devised an ingenious method of funding for the band whereby fans buy shares in the music – magic! In a similarly credit-crunching move, the good twosome have decided to give away a remix of their new single Fly Away FREE. Honey Ryder defy the old tradition of not mixing...
Delicately
“Bad Flirt has gone from lo-fi acoustic twee to sparkling hard pop that falls delicately between Norway’s black metal legends Mayhem and UK shoegazers Lush… they buckled down with famed producer Howard Bilerman (Arcade Fire, Wolf Parade) to create the high-energy pop rock - chalk full of stellar hooks and archetypal post-punk bass lines - Virgin Talk.”
Soundtrack of that sentiment
“No Junk Mail Please juxtaposes poignant melodies with rustic orchestral accompaniments to assemble simply beautiful results “We chose this title so that we could include a sticker that, once applied to your mailbox, would cease the delivery of admail,” says frontman Super Robertson. “The music is the soundtrack of that sentiment.””
Communicating the excitement
“The album also features the breathtaking “Echo Hill,” Vallance’s tribute to Los Angeles, replete with cello, accordion and Leslie-amplified guitars. Communicating the excitement of life in his new home, Ed sings, “See the moon on Echo Hill / Telescope trained on the stars / Shaking hands and parking cars / Over and over.”“
Love and betrayal
“Dear Pitchfork, What are you waiting for? 17 Pygmies’ new cd Celestina is a concept album, an eleven-part symphonic rock suite about love and betrayal in space based on a short story written by bandleader/guitarist Jackson Del Rey.”
Post-modern drollness
“…Charles Rocket on heavy metal accordion, played through a stack of Marshall amps and an array of guitar pedals. Rocket had just been fired from Saturday Night Live for saying “fuck” live on air, and his performance of “Wild Thing” is a triumph of post-modern drollness. He actually gets screaming feedback out of his squeezebox.”
Which, of course they also hate
“Ok these two guys, they’re disgusted with everything except their families and sex. So, after they sniffed one another out, one said, “We should make a record so one of us doesn’t end up a sniper in a McDonald’s.” The other one said, “Yeah, OK, but I’m not leaving my house.” Anyway, Palumbo and LK - the guys in question - decided that “Palumbo and LK” sounded like some bogus tree hugging...
October 2008
8 posts
Hard-hearted
“The idiosyncratic lyricism of the album’s love songs is sure to warm the cockles of listener’s hearts. When echoing vocals ascend after the darkly, bass-heavy intro to “You Will Love My Boom” and [x] shouts,” I love you love you/ You know I love you I love you/ I took mushrooms and then proposed to you because I love you love you,” it’s a...
Ancient cosmology
After the ominous, trembling, synthetically angelic choral intro on the first track, [x] breaks in with a vision that sounds like a bizarre hybrid of a Diddy rap video and ancient cosmology; “Black girls walk on the tips of mountains/ Black girls jump into seas like they was fountains / Black girls build skyscrapers with their brains/ Black girls do shit that I can’t explain/ Black...
One very rainy evening
“”It’s the sound they were born to make - if you believe the fortune-teller whose mysterious predictions were the catalyst for the formation of the band back in the day when their worlds collided in a cozy European Cafe, one very rainy evening.”
The question that everyone loves to ask
“People have a history of getting hung up on labels. Mention the band [x] to folks and they hit you with the question that everyone loves to ask and everyone else hates to answer—“what do they sound like?” Telling people that listening to [x] feels like being dragged down a flight of stairs while being sung a lullaby never seems to satisfy them. Another critic once wrote...
Call it 'classic' if you must
“Ordinary music tends to get classified by genre. Some of it is quite exciting. It does what you expect it to, but it follows the formula well enough that its derivative nature doesn’t matter. We call it indie, or pop, or modern rock, and we recommend it to listeners who enjoy those styles. But every now and then, a band reminds us that when the songs are good enough and innovative...
Asked only for a bottle of whisky
“Further adding to the transient and homeless theme, [x] employed the singing talents of an itinerant local to help with backing vocals on the album. “I wanted a vocalist who sounded like an old man, I told [x] who produced the album and he said ‘what about the Old Man of Bath?’ It turned out to be a down-on-his-luck thespian who lived in the local hospice. We brought him in and...
Old hippo-teeth
“Rock balladeers Christian Kiefer, Matthew Gerken and Jefferson Pitcher have performed a remarkable feat. They have composed and recorded 43 songs, one for each of the past and current presidents of these United States, and will release them as a 3-disc set… These songs-poems set to music, really-wittily, and sometimes not entirely politely, take issue with the mythology that those who...
A modern day Faust
“”The Devil and George and Bush” is a free downloadable musical satire podcast that skewers the lame duck president, the presidential candidates, corporate greed and stupidity, reality TV and basically our entire American way of life. It follows the attempts of a modern day Faust who, with the help of the Devil, tries to corner the world market in mandatory computer upgrades...