Sam Jayne, leader of Love as Laughter, would have you believe Laughter’s Fifth is a cock-in-fist homage to all that is bluesy, ballsy and cool about classic rock. After all, 2001’s Sea to Shining Sea was exactly that: a greasy scramble of the Who, Skynyrd, Thin Lizzy and Exile on…
“I’ve always found that writing about places is kind of the primal poetry,” says Jake Adam York. “I’m a big wanderer. For me, pathways are the most captivating things.” York knows a thing or two about pathways. The route of his own life has taken him across the map, from…
From small-town Missouri to headlining the Gothic Theatre, Nathaniel Rateliff and Joseph Pope of Born in the Flood have raised their watermark considerably over the last few years. After relocating to Denver for a brief spell of missionary work, the two flirted with shoegazer, blues and even Southern rock before…
When Whiskeytown broke up, Ryan Adams’s eminently gifted guitar partner, Phil Wandscher, decided to take the low road. Now that Adams has become more of a pinup and media gadfly than a tunesmith, it’s up to Wandscher’s current group, Jesse Sykes and the Sweet Hereafter, to maintain the integrity and…
Raw rock grooves, chant-based “vocal scraps,” heroic doses of organ-soaked psychedelia: Such are the trappings of Apes. The quixotic Washington, D.C., quartet has spent the last five years plumbing the murky swamp land bordered by Les Savy Fav, early Deep Purple and Rembrandt Pussyhorse-era Butthole Surfers. The result, as evidenced…
“I can’t stand that sloppy shit.” It was at the 15th Street Tavern that I was offered this opinion on music by a drunk, middle-aged devotee of Ronnie James Dio. I still don’t know what “that sloppy shit” is exactly — but whatever Dio Dude meant, he’d surely be pissed…
With a soaring choral intro that erupted abruptly into erratic sprays of knuckle-blistering guitar, British Sea Power’s debut album, The Decline of British Sea Power, was anything but predictable. But Open Season, the English group’s anticipated followup, is exactly what you’d expect from a sophomore effort: a tamer, meeker, more…
Over the course of human evolution, the sight of blood has become something that induces revulsion instead of hunger. The men of Unsane, then, are unabashed throwbacks; Blood Run, the trio’s fifth full-length, is an orgiastic blast of pure noise that guzzles gore like some Paleolithic misanthrope. But it isn’t…
Does the phrase so smart, its dumb mean anything anymore? If so, you couldnt find a more perfect example of it than Sexyharrasment, the debut full-length by an enigmatic Broomfield duo known as Lint! Swinging blindly between remedial electro-pop and Negativland-esque noise collages, vocalist/programmers Arlo White and Jason McDaniel (a…
Cellos, dub shivers, disco lubrication, avant-garde detachment — sounds like a recipe for Arthur Russell’s revolutionary proto-house of the early ’80s. But it’s also a shopping list for the throbbing tones of Out Hud’s Let Us Never Speak of It Again. Sharing three members with funk-deconstructionist outfit !!!, the quintet…
I’ve got this idea for a video,” says Craig Macintosh, “of me in the middle of the street taking a shit and picking my nose and pissing all over the place. It’s so important to do. I feel like I have to do that.” Macintosh has some issues with fame…
According to Shane Ewegen — a highly sarcastic source if there ever was one — bandmate Nick Moses is a theoretical physicist who has “dedicated the last fifteen years to research into the possibility of building a perpetual-motion machine.” And although that’s total bullshit, the members of The Fifth Utility…
As rock slips further into the realm of the academic, its past becomes subject less to visceral renaissance and more to analysis via cool dispassion. It’s hard to tell which side of the chalkboard Black Mountain is marked on; the Canadian group’s eponymous debut is a test tube boiling over…
Veiled allusion, subtle metaphorŠ. Fine for Joni Mitchell, not so much for Ms. Led. The coed Seattle quintet recently unleashed its sophomore full-length, These Things We Say, an utterly straightforward and plainspoken post-riot-grrrl statement that draws from Team Dresch and Sleater-Kinney even as it pares song and sentiment down to…
Independence: Some die for it. Others just rap about it. Living Legends fall into the latter category — though the longstanding Bay-Area crew would have you believe that its staunchly indie ideal is noble enough to boast about in every other verse. Classic continues the tradition of sparse beats and…
Refused, although one of the most important punk groups of the ’90s, was far from original. The Swedish quintet swiped caterwauls from Fugazi, posture from Rage Against the Machine, rhetoric from Nation of Ulysses and song titles from Born Against. Still, the resultant clusterfuck turned out to be vital and…
You know what they say about 99 percent perspiration? Well, it’s true.” Donnie Jerome, bassist for Denver’s Local 33, is commenting on the fact that it’s taken his band seven years to release its debut full-length, Hearts That Bend. The outfit was formed in 1998 by singer/guitarist Eric Lowe, the…
Atmosphere and gravity: two invisible, intangible things that keep us alive even as they imprison us. Strangers Die Everyday is well versed in this contradiction; the Boulder quartet uses bass, drums, cello and violin in its attempt to simultaneously harness and succumb to these vast, pervasive forces. Begun in late…
Shitting and dying: Somewhere between these two smelliest of biological inevitabilities lies the music of Man Man. The Philadelphia trio slings a mixed satchel of keyboards, trumpets, marimbas, guitars and twitchy percussion, taking aim at just about every left-field style of sonic esoterica imaginable: post-punk, merengue, klezmer, pop, doo-wop, jazz…
Cephalic Carnage’s last album, 2002’s Lucid Interval, should have been its masterpiece. But the group was hamstrung by its own precision; sterile and dryly processed, the recording seemed more like a slick exercise than a grueling grindcore ordeal. Anomalies, though, delivers the blood and guts Lucid lacked — and then…
It’s funny, but for as long as Ian MacKaye has been making incredible, vastly influential music, no one’s really stopped to think of him as a songwriter. Of course, isolating his contributions to Fugazi isn’t easy. The band has long thrived on an almost telepathic symbiosis, with MacKaye and fellow…
The Locust makes shitty albums. The anarchic San Diego quartet just can’t sustain interest for any prolonged period of time; its most compelling stuff has always been found crammed onto one side of split seven-inch singles. 2003’s disastrously dull Plague Soundscapes was the perfect example of the group’s full-length entropy…
