With each track, we are allowed a glimpse into a world of heartbreak and honesty, confessions from a journal set to music and shared with whoever dares to hear them. Each song is stripped down to the barest essentials: a woman, her guitar, and her soul.
Apparently leading rising progressive metal band Between the Buried and Me isn’t quite enough for Tommy Rogers, AKA Thomas Giles, so he lets his muse out to play on Pulse.
They may not sound like how you remember them, but the New York Dolls are back with the first essential summer record of 2011.
Basically, it’s two Texan bands playing alternative rock that’s heavily rooted in the ’90s.
Montreal’s Bad Uncle are a rough and steamy band of miscreant gypsy-punx held together by duct tape, whisky and mad chops. While there’s a band like this in everybody’s city (right?), Bad Uncle are head and shoulders above the crowd for myriad reasons.
This is the sound of a band worried less about having to prove themselves as Oasis Mk. II and more about simply making a good record with cracking tunes.
Robertson keeps his sonic ambitions in check, eschewing gimmicks and letting the songs speak for themselves.
These would be excellent songs to sing to a first-born child at bedtime.
A 7” that revels and succeeds in its minimalism and honesty.
Tiers and Other Stories, the latest opus from pop auteur Richard X. Heyman, is at once both ambitious and modest.
Vatican City is known more for pope hats than garage rock, though where better to get your rock’n‘roll than from the most (arguably) influential city on the planet?
Hunx And His Punx have captured what I imagined a trip to the corner malt shop in the 1950’s to be like. This is an excellent and fuzzy update of classic 50’s American pop.
Let’s hear it for the rock & roll true believers, the ones who pick up that guitar and step up to that microphone with the confidence that rock & roll will save your soul.
Those who find ghostly wisps of shoegazing faerie dust appealing will likely find Eifelian similarly appealing.
With inspiration from an unlikely source, Mike Watt started a record label and put out his magnum opus.
Sun in the Satellite take a more subtle approach to heady music, as opposed to the bombastic wall-of-sound that you usually get.
If you’re into heavy oi street punk, this is a slab of vinyl you won’t want to miss.
This cassette, a pretty chunk of sick right-brained rock jams, is a tasty lemon-lime work of art. These kids make a lot of deprecating and sly jokes in of and around the tunes, which have a quick-cut basement 4 track feel which is fairly consistent. They don’t take anything seriously (thank fucking god) not even The Beatles .
If By Yes is, in the main, a collaboration of singer Petra Haden and keyboardist/producer Yuka Honda, a project born out of nearly a decade of casual songwriting and friendship.
Co-authoring and performing with his friends and disciples in the Scottish pop scene, Collins knocks out gem after pop rock gem in a manner that would seem casual if you didn’t know his recent history.
Neorev embodies the epitome of what electronic dance music should be.
Busted At Oz is an essential time capsule of Chicago’s under-appreciated punk scene.
A couple of years ago, Yep Roc did the universe a service and rescued Jesus of Cool, the trailblazing solo debut of the irrepressible Nick Lowe, from oblivion. Now the label does the same for his 1979 follow-up, the equally delightful Labour of Lust.
Flight of the Solstice Queens is an album so refreshingly diverse, it’ll leave you scratching your head wondering if it’s the same person.
No matter Spector’s faults as a human being (and let’s face it – there are plenty), his work as a producer and songwriter has held up extremely well, even half a century on.
The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart’s sophomore album would be a perfect soundtrack to a John Hughes teen flick remake.
Mulatu Steps Ahead is an album of East African mystery, Latin influences and a mix of Afrobeat and highlife.
Napoleon Sodomite is a slab of truly heavy, immediately gratifying, un-fuckwithable riffs that taps the dark roots of unpretentious ‘banger ear-candy.
At times the sounds are beautiful, but there’s an underlying sinister element to it all.
A double-CD set, the record spotlights Jakszyk’s compositions on one disk and a set of covers on the other.
I want to flail ludicrously around the room in much the same way that The Fall make me wiggle all willy-nilly like I’m on an episode of Yo Gabba Gabba or something.
Tight and tuneful, Waving at the Astronauts is one of Pollard’s best efforts in a while.
Fueled By Zen is four songs of ’70s-influenced stoner rock, very heavy on the Black Sabbath.
Hi-kicking and ass-kicking, Philly’s Bandname is a kinetic ball of fun. Their new full length, Breakfast is a rad collection of sun-drenched punk chops for the uncynical.
Austin-based experimental guitar duo FiRES WERE SHOT releases only their third record in nearly 15 years, but the beauty found within makes it worth the wait.
Canadian composer Tim Hecker delivers an album of quiet drones and gentle meditative moments.
Armed with just his guitars, Wino lays himself and his vision out as nakedly as possible – no thundering rhythm section, no co-vocalist, just the man, his fingers, six strings and his exposed heart.
Surf Narcs is a sexy swirl of glam, new wave and roots punk, with that necessary bit of surf to keep us dressed in our bathing suits while a chorus line of drag queens dances around us.
The debut from Jace Lasek’s Besnard Lakes side project, The Soft Province, strips down the ethereal and some magic is lost. The straightforwardness of the songs will be refreshing to those who find the Besnard Lakes too sprawling.
DoTV’s debut album is a rollicking foray into the hard rock of forty years ago, when just about everything on the rock stations was “stoner” rock.
With buffed-up supporting vocals from the Jordanaires and deeper low-end bass than has previously been released, the Elvis is Back! Legacy Edition sparkles at every turn and better yet, it serves as reminder that Elvis Presley was much more than a country boy with animal magnetism and one of the best back-up bands of his time.
Working with touch guitarist/co-producer Trey Gunn, Zhelannaya takes a batch of elderly songs – some over 1000 years old – and lays them in atmospheric, almost ambient electronic beds that often twist worldbeat clichés and rock dynamics into new shapes.
It’s the instrumental tracks that stand out here, displaying what Otto Kinzel is truly capable of without the obstacle of bad singing to get in the way.
Smashface mixes an eclectic batch of influences into an infectious set of songs that will alternatively have you shaking your head and singing along.
“I really had a thing about the seriousness of folk music. I mean, with oldtimey – Dr. Smith’s Champion Hoss-hair Pullers, these old ‘20’s groups —they were all fuckin’ goofy-ass, weird nutty shit, you know? I thought the weird nutty shit was more, like, the point of it than the serious meaningful ‘People’s Rhetoric’ approach.”
Songs About Fucking Steve Albini is like a complete deconstruction of dance music to its extraneous elements, like the beats that propel the music have been removed, leaving only the strange sounds and effects that garnish the track as the main focus.
Cloud Nothings delivers on the promise of earlier work without abandoning the immediacy or charm that perked up attentive ears in the first place.
Like contemporaries The Brian Jonestown Massacre, the Witches see psych rock as contemporary art, rather than nostalgic exercise, and if Gregory is less enamored of shoegazing and the Paisley Underground than Anton Newcombe, he sees eye-to-eye on the idea that psych doesn’t have to be about peace, love and pretty flowers.
While making their third record, Texas based band Eisley experienced label shakeups, divorces, and breakups, and produced an album of beauty, loss, and redemption as a result.
