Once again Drag City scours the cemetery of lost recordings and pulls up a real treasure, this time an unreleased album from New Zealand’s Doug Jerebine.
Japanese minimalist composer Atsuhito Omori has composed an album worth of romantic, tranquil instrumentals that will help you beat the heat and relax.
It’s a bit like slowly scanning the dial of a shortwave radio, trying to reach that transmission, but just missing it every time.
Pulling liberally from every good genre of rock, N.N. really sound like true believers, paring down the riffs and songs to a gloriously sludgy essence, the drums and bass a pillar of stone, the guitars burned and rough, the vocals dangerous and full of pathos.
In the late ’80s/early ’90s, Stephen Svanholm played guitar in UK thrash-funk-metal band, Ignorance, releasing two albums on Metal Blade before settling down to study music seriously and become a full-fledged opera singer.
The most complete and enjoyable album of new material Susanna Hoffs has ever released, including Bangles records.
This is garage punk of the highest order, which makes sense considering the band contains members of The Radio Reelers, The Complaints and The Trust Fund Babies.
Jen Schande opens a nineties time capsule and reminds us what we’ve been missing.
If I have to choose sides in the Zombie apocalypse, I’m throwing in with these guys. This set captures an intimate show from the band’s astonishing 50th anniversary year at Metropolis Studios in London.
Wish You Were Here represents many things in the Pink Floyd canon. Ultimately, it emerges as the band’s most focused artistic statement, even while examining the separate themes of Roger Waters’ struggle against the machinery of the music industry and the still-open wound of the absence of band founder Syd Barrett.
The style of her lyrics is the result of a practical consideration: Hyvönen’s train of thought is too highly associative to be forced into a rhyme scheme.
The Seventy Sevens’ early records garnered comparisons ranging from Echo and the Bunnymen to The Rolling Stones. That may have hampered their marketable identity, but it made them a beloved one-band jukebox to fans. Sticks and Stones captures the band’s schizophrenia at its best.
A comfortable punch in the face that reeks of basement tours and beer, Nubians , though sloppy and no-fi, can’t hide the fact that there are some capable-ass musicians behind the murk, ready to party and make plenty more gratifying and edge-kicking punk tapes.
Just a tick on the “fi” side of lo-fi bedroom beats, the songs weave a dark and seedy path through the various stages of urban concern and pathos.
Redd Kross comes storming back with the hook laden Researching The Blues”
An album that turns down the volume a bit still has some rambunctious moments.
With this collection of rare early releases and previously unreleased live and rehearsal recordings from Brazil’s black/death/thrash barbarians, Metalhit.com finalizes its most recent trilogy of South American extreme metal.
You’ve probably heard by now that for his umpteenth album, Neil Young chose to sing (mostly) American (mostly) folk songs. It seemed like a good idea, and I wanted to like this album. I’m a huge Neil Young fan — I’ve even been known to defend the merits of Landing on Water. So yes, I wanted to like it, but I just can’t.
It’s easy enough to categorize Mangoo‘s second album Neverland as stoner rock, but to dismiss the Finnish quintet as yet another meat-and-potatoes heavy rock troop is markedly unfair.
It’s fitting that Swedish free jazzers The Thing, a band named after a composition by Don Cherry, have now collaborated with his stepdaugher Neneh Cherry.
This is furious rage in its purest form, unapologetic, unsympathetic, uncompromising, uninhibited animalistic fury that attacks only to kill.
The music of Bestial Holocaust falls somewhere between Sarcófago’s first two albums, INRI and The Laws of Scourge.
Hurray! Hurrah! Yippee! Yay! Huzzah! Phil Wilson took us to heart, reformed The June Brides, and here it is, their first new single in 26 years!!! It’s GREAT!!!!!
Pennsylvania-based experimental duo Blues Control release their first record on new label Drag City, eschewing the heavier, proggier moments of their previous releases for a light, restrained, and extremely mellow record.
A low key progressive rock superduo.
Where many death metal bands look to the Swedish scene of technical proficiency and high-end equipment for inspiration, Deathronation take a more old school, analog approach.
In less deft hands, all the style-hopping would just seem that the artist was trying to show off but in the hands of Saraiya, it all makes a weird kind of sense.
Cold, calculating, angry, and everything you want from a Fear Factory record.
Sister duo CocoRosie release a brand new vinyl single with two strong songs; the big news, however, is that it is a new release on dormant label Touch & Go.
For those who prefer a bit of melody with their metal, there’s Britain’s Forefather.
Very late review of Alabama Shakes’ debut album Boys & Girls
Stamey’s interestingly-titled “Collide-oOo-Scope” and Holsapple’s moving “She Won’t Drive in the Rain Anymore” end the album on a huge high note before going into the finale title track.
Chronology provides a compelling and worthwhile overview of Talking Heads’ career. Rather than trying to manufacture a narrative, the band’s history is told primarily through a series of musical nuggets – allowing the band to speak for itself.
Icelandic composer Ólafur Arnalds’s soundtrack to Sam Levinson’s film is a subtle, sublime collection of melancholy instrumentals.
With full-production and epic sound-quality, Consummatum Est is a solid statement of razor-sharp black metal with a death metal edge.
The Men deliver the best Matador subscription single so far. No surprise because they’re great.
There’s a way to pull off a sweatily awkward sense of the icky and inappropriate, and P/DO P/DRO are easily masters at elucidating the profane, from their live satanic invocations to their trashy and irreverent circuit-bending sound.
This nicely packaged gem of a 7” is a real mind voyage laden with some tasty concrete/actuelle treatments just this side of “too cool” for serious electroacoustic chin-strokers.
The Thrift knows how to write substantial tunes, and then attack them with the fervor of teenagers plugging into the amps for the first time.
Though closer to the Mississippi River of Eastern Ontario than that of the Southern Delta region, catl have that muddy water in their bodies and souls, and that’s what makes their newest album shine.
Philly’s sunny sweetheart Shorty Boy-Boy drops some grit into his pop machine with an auspicious single, a debut from the maverick party animal culture explosion that is BITBY.
Pomegranates bass-player prefaces the band’s forthcoming album with a six-song cassette of solo bass explorations.
Reminiscent, but not imitative, of Joe Jackson, Elvis Costello and their peers.
In a field perhaps over-filled with unauthorized biographies, Days of Our Lives is a refreshing and illuminating look into the arc of Queen’s stadium-sized career. Benefiting from full band involvement, the documentary makes for great drama. Above all, it’s filled with ambitious and extravagant rock and roll.
With this collection of tracks, Neorev proves to be a solid force in underground electronic music.
