Last spring, (die) Pilot unleashed Radiation, Weather, Art, a promising debut bursting with guitar hooks, gloriously loose arrangements and gouged-out angst. Less than a year later, singer/guitarist Eugene Brown has seen a total turnaround in the band’s roster; the last original member to jump ship was keyboardist Peter Antypas. Luckily…

While Portland’s Dear Nora is known on record as a sprawling collective of nearly a dozen musicians, the group’s core member, singer/guitarist Katy Davidson, is touring the country totally alone. Well, not totally — she’s joined on the road by songwriter Owen Ashworth, who performs under the name Casiotone for…

First, a couple of basic axioms: Sun Kil Moon’s Mark Kozelek is underrated; Modest Mouse’s Isaac Brock is overrated. That said, Sun Kil Moon’s Tiny Cities, an album of Modest Mouse covers, just doesn’t add up. While Kozelek has previously paid tribute on disc to both AC/DC and John Denver,…

Milemarker is known as Chicago’s premier purveyor of microchip-addled post-hardcore and brainy political lyricism. But the group, formed in North Carolina in 1997, has had its share of detours. After a string of theatrically conceived tours and innovative, influential albums culminating in 2002’s Satanic Versus, Milemarker went into stasis, with…

There’s nothing wrong with a little pseudo-sisterly rivalry. Not that Orenda Fink and her Azure Ray comrade, Maria Taylor, were necessarily competing by debuting solo albums within months of each other this year. Nonetheless, it’s impossible to avoid comparing the two. But even if this were a cutthroat showdown, Fink…

Post-hardcore can be split into two eras: pre-At the Drive-In and post-At the Drive-In. Oklahoma’s Traindodge sticks out by sounding as if ATDI never existed. Forgoing the sexy, sassy acrobatics that have come to define the genre, the trio peddles a brand of cerebrally accelerated aggression that requires a bit…

Grace Gale might go down as the least original band Denver has ever seen. Everything about the group’s new full-length, A Few Easy Steps to Secure Heli-Camel Safety, screams, well, screamo. Of course, that term is pretty played out — but then again, so are the sounds on this CD…

Thursday’s Geoff Rickly is no Lorenzo de’Medici — but then again, the Blackout Pact is hardly Michelangelo. Still, Rickly’s patronage of the Denver quintet (he produced and released its debut, Hello Sailor, on his own vanity label) has yielded a minor punk masterpiece. While rooted in Thursday’s trademark epic melancholy,…

“We don’t do cool,” reads the Machine Gun Blues website. “We work our asses off to bleed on stage.” Of course, the outfit is wrong on both counts: Its ragged, pounding fusion of the Stooges and ’60s British R&B is infinitely, if not self-consciously, hip. And no matter how much…

The Johnny and June Carter Cash biopic Walk the Line hits the big screen this month. But if you want to see some real country-music chemistry in action, put your money on Caitlin Cary and Thad Cockrell. The North Carolina comrades’ new collaboration, Begonias, is a throwback to the golden…

Guitar solos have a lot in common with human speech. They can be whispered. They can be screamed. They can be slurred or articulate, concise or long-winded. But, as with verbal communication, they simply need to say the right thing at the right time. 8:05, the debut by Denver’s Bad…

It’s like something out of Hans Christian Andersen: A shy teenage girl is discovered by the manager of the Rolling Stones and billed as the “female Bob Dylan” — but renounces the world of pop to trek across the English countryside in a wagon. Along the way, she makes a…

It looks like all those idle assembly lines in Detroit have been put to a new use: pumping out scruffy garage bands soaked in high-octane R&B. But unlike some of its tougher, woman-fronted neighbors such as the Paybacks and the Detroit Cobras, the Hard Lessons crams pure pop into its…

It’s pretty routine for aging rockers to name-check hip young bands as influences. And though the thought of John Cale air-guitaring to Bloc Party is kind of gross, his newfound interest in everything from dance-punk to hip-hop carries some weight. For forty years, ever since he forsook classical music in…

Playing the Angel’s first cut is called “A Pain That I’m Used To.” Its second is called “Suffer Well.” And the disc’s back cover bears the epigraph, “Pain and suffering in various tempos.” We get the idea. Yes, pain and suffering are spelled out — if never actually conveyed –…

Just as Planes Mistaken for Stars finished inking a new deal with Abacus, a subsidiary of Century Media, the group’s side project, Ghost Buffalo, joined the roster of local punk institution Suburban Home. The sad news? Matt Bellinger has quit Planes — which he helped found in 1998 — to…