Mascott’s soothing, alluring music is an ideal remedy for the encroaching winter doldrums.
Interestingly, it’s the female-fronted bands, Australia’s Stranglehold and especially Santa Cruz, CA’s Custom Fit that stand out the most.
This is truly modern music that acknowledges the past while striving for the future.
Hammock’s music draws out such powerful emotions that one can be blinded with joy even while tears blur your vision.
On its third LP, TV Ghost puts a Midwestern spin on British gothic postpunk.
There is a gorgeous hue to this album, a very conscious shading and nuance that draws equal inspiration from Rick White era Can-rock as it does the angelic harmonic layering of Harmonium.
Back during the Great Alt.country Scare of the 1990s, the Bottle Rockets were stars.
Spiritually, however, the band comes straight out of the psychedelic 60s, especially the British variety.
On their sophomore effort, the Bronx-based trio outdo themselves with a raging collection of songs that recall ’90s noise rock as much as SST hardcore.
The Polish quartet swells to the heavens, creating great waves of uplifting melody and letting them crash on a beach of bright, glistening texture.
Kelley Deal 6000 to Waxahatchee’s Breeders, but with a fairer chance of matching the popularity of the sister band.
Singer/songwriters are a penny a hundred these days, and it’s difficult to parse the marvelous from the mediocre. Donovan Woods is a good example of the former.
Featuring vocalist/keyboardist Cee-Q from Marquee VII and Pairs drummer Xiao Zhong on guitar, the duo delivers eight haunting tracks of dreamy sadness that’s as engaging as it is depressive.
This snappily dressed Ventura, CA foursome serves up another round of raucous, swampy country/blues-inspired rock.
Former Music Lover Matthew Edwards and his band the Unfortunates follow up their brilliant debut LP The Fates with this equally marvelous 45.
Some may call this ‘electrogaze’, but I call it a taste of dream pop heaven.
The Flowers put one foot in jangle and the other in jagged for a lesson in tuneful postpunk.
More proof that good old-fashioned guitar rock never goes out of style.
With his latest LP X, singer/songwriter/pop auteur Richard X. Heyman keeps doing what he’s always done: 60s-informed (but not obsessive), guitar-based pop music.
While these track are highly compositional and tightly controlled, they lose none of the organic elements that make music so immediately tangible and accessible.
From the “tribute band” obsessed enclave of Long Island, NY comes the unlikely spazz-rock Bangladeafy, a duo whose music twists in a tornado of various styles.
For his first widely distributed solo release, psych-metal/alt-country guitarist Jenks Miller (Horseback, Mount Moriah) delivers a dusty slab of improvised and loosely structured country-blues Americana.
Seattle’s Week of Wonders is probably the most un-Seattle band you’ll ever hear.
The frigid tundra of Northeastern China seems an unlikely place for a swampy punk band, yet the UK ex-pat led GuiGuiSuiSui & The Electric Shadows are just that.
The music of Weed gives the mind and soul wings, as if you were soaring high above the glaciers and mountains.. a real triumph and excellent addition to the renaissance of Canadian DIY music.
There is magic at work here, a very organic kind that transcends the wood, steel and electricity of the instruments. The guitar, the drums, they are more lightening rods for the spirit world than mere instruments.
Mystery is a limitation in the Callahan universe, illumination a deeper quality, even when the answers it provides aren’t very straightforward.
For their third release, Los Angeles-based Blue delivers thirty and a half minutes of lo-fi harsh noise reminiscent of Japanese greats Aube and mid-80s Merzbow.
Exploring negative emotions is probably an extremely unpleasant experience for most people, but for Manos Michaelides, aka Athens, Greece’s Ego Death, it provides catharsis.
With a sound recalling Merzbow‘s early tape-loop driven cassette releases, C.C.C.C.‘s Hiroshi Hasegawa brings us into an electric forest of live wires and motherboards.
One of the most straightforward sequels a great album ever had.
With its second LP Razed to the Ground, Fort Worth’s Pinkish Black continues forging its distinctive alloy for synthesizer-based rock.
Imagine hiking in the Himalayas, rounding a corner and discovering the alien spaceship responsible for the world’s religion and technology.
Originally released as an extremely limited cassette in 1990, Independence Day quickly became a seminal release and template for the American oi scene.
Both of these potent slices of instrumental soul are available on Menahan Street Band’s full-length LP The Crossing, but there’s something so right about playing them as a well-matched pair on a 45 r.p.m. single.
King Krule is the stage name of Archy Marshall, a British guitarist and singer. 6 Feet Beneath The Moon is his first LP. His voice erases a decade and a half of mopey indie rock and drops you off somewhere else, some street corner that you don’t even recognize.
Hope for the return of the MGM musical, immediately dashed by her rarity.
The NYC power trio finds new interstellar paths to explore – paths that traverse only one light year, instead of a dozen.
Feet planted firmly in a base of shoegaze, the vocals are appropriately muted and understated and the guitars in a layered, fuzzy sheen.
MFP continue in the Beantown tradition, adding their name to the list of hardcore greats.
In an inhospitable country, she’s scaled family life and music to a size that might allow them to endure.
Got the 7” blues? Pick this up for an instant cure-all and a pick-me-up that’ll last as long as the damn record plays!
What do you get when you put Will Johnson, David Bazan, and brothers Matt and Bubba Kadane in a recording studio?
From the bustling Shanghai underground music scene comes Naohai, a Chinese trio whose dreamy, emotional music nods heavily to American indie rock.
Seattle-based indie-poppers tease the ears of listeners with a quick two-song blast of pop!
Connecticut is known more for spawning The Carpenters and Moby than UK-fueled goth rock, but in the mid-80s, The Dispossessed, from Hartford, made their mark with their own vision of dreamy death rock.
