Terry Sawyer

You'd be justified in being hostile toward all releases bearing the words "electro-pop" in their description, just for the sheer enormity of hacks working under a genre title that means basically "got ripped in my bedroom and decided I could be an Internet sensation." But Larytta works the same musical...

With lead guitarist Graham Tyler absent, Have Mercy has but a thin tether to the Mooney Suzuki's rawer Ramones edge, spotlighting instead singer Sammy James Jr.'s desire to sound like David Lee Roth rewriting Exile on Main Street between county fair appearances. There's inspiration, and then there's fellatio; Have Mercy...

In an era when you can practically take every album into the critic's version of the CSI laboratory (complete with Zero 7 playing in the background) in order to determine its exact points of reference and the width of its bandwagon tread, it's refreshing to hear something like Welcome's Sirs,...

Where !!!'s last release, Louden Up Now, sounded like a Ph.D. student's disconnected deconstructions of Klymaxx and post-punk, Myth Takes hews much closer to extended, almost mechanical grooves, give or take the occasional overwrought freakout of diarrhetic songs such as "Bend Over Beethoven." The act's range on Myth succeeds in...

If Fergie required an artistic answer (aside from "Uh, no, thanks"), MC Romy Hoffman, aka Macromantics, would be the perfect nuclear-blast reply. Rather than dangle her pussy like car keys, Hoffman cuts verbal territory in back-flipped knots of Mad Hatter intellectualism. Moments in Movement builds its grooves off jagged edges...