For the Holiday’s self-titled debut starts with a surge of keyboards and chiming bells that sounds positively, well, holiday-like. And the disc just gets more literal from there: “On the Bright Side” waxes luminously about candles and sunlit skies, while “Ostinato” employs the same drowsy, mesmerizing arpeggio for nearly its…
At this point, Keane falls short of fascinating, but bandmates Tom Chaplin, Richard Hughes and Tim Rice-Oxley could be headed in the right direction. After all, Radiohead, one of the group’s principal role models, wasn’t considered terribly innovative when it emerged during the first half of the ’90s, but that…
The human voice may have the most sonically complex timbre known to man, but the Bay Area’s Sound Tribe Sector 9 is hell-bent on proving that man-made instruments can be just as compelling. Actually, while the voices of San Francisco’s Audio Angel and Athens’s Kozmos do show up on Artifact,…
Way back in 2002, acts from the chilly countries of Scandinavia were hot, hot, hot in the States, and the (International) Noise Conspiracy seemed poised to capitalize. The Swedish five-piece, led by Lars Strmberg and Dennis Lyxzén, beat many of its competitors to U.S. stores with strong releases such as…
Swedes with black leather jackets and fake English accents… Whatever, dude. While a quick glance at Mando Diao might not leave a very glowing first impression, full immersion in Hurricane Bar, its sophomore full-length, will more than convince anyone of the quartet’s eruptive punch and songwriting virtuosity. Amid a prickly…
Stoned, stumped and stoked: just some of the feelings you can expect when you hear Open Hand. Bringing together elements of stoner and prog metal, acid biker rock, hardcore and punk, these rockers without borders leave you vainly groping for the right label. On the band’s sophomore Trustkill release, You…
Neither post-punk nor garage rock, the Ponys’ sound gallops somewhere in between. But instead of half-assed hybrid, the Chicago foursome’s new disc, Celebration Castle, comes across as a smooth synthesis of icy echoes and blood-boiling flux. Last year’s Laced With Romance was exactly that. But Castle goes even further, steeping…
When Tanner Olson moved to Denver from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, he brought with him quite a pedigree. As guitarist for the progressive hardcore outfits the Spirit of Versailles and Examination of the…, he’d already had a taste of forging noises both experimental and bludgeoning. But with his new band,…
When DB moved to the Big Apple in 1989, the Brit transplant essentially brought underground-dance and rave culture with him. As co-founder of the infamous NASA parties (some of the first rave parties on American soil), DB established himself as a trailblazer in the scene by being among the first…
Bruce Springsteen is a phony piece of crap. This was my firm opinion as a teenager in the early ’90s just starting to seriously get into music. And I wasn’t alone. Ask anyone of roughly the same age, and you’ll likely hear a similar sentiment: Back then, Springsteen — America’s…
I’m made out of metal now,” says 31-year-old hillbilly bluesman Scott H. Biram. “I got metal rods and plates and screws all in me. I always go through the rigmarole at the airport. I tell ’em I’m bionic. In fact, a paper in Lafayette called me ‘the bionic redneck.'” Headed…
John Doe had better watch his back. He’s become public enemy number two, second only to Osama. Last week, the Recording Industry Association of America further clogged the already overburdened justice system by filing another 725 lawsuits against J-to-the-Dizzo, that nefarious and elusive digital gangsta. By God, if the RIAA…
Over the years, the thing that’s kept the Deftones from being cast as an also-ran in the nu-metal franchise has been Chino Moreno’s subversive sensibilities. The vocalist’s affinity for all things Smiths (Robert, and the outfit led by Morrissey), which is unmistakable in his breathy delivery, has helped the band…
Spoon has always been the best approximation of a Motown indie glam outfit, with songs sprung on hand claps and hooks tucked into every piano riff and acoustic strum. Coupled with the warm nasal scuff of Britt Daniel’s groove-riding turns of phrase, Spoon dishes out literate white-boy soul wrapped in…
Doseone is no stranger to collating his muted, twisted emceeing with post-rock abstraction. Besides sharing guest-larynx duties with Sam Prekop of The Sea and Cake on Prefuse 73’s Vocal Studies and Uprock Narratives, he participated in a transatlantic collaboration in 2001 that resulted in Hood’s ambient-glitch masterpiece, Cold House. Last…
If, at any point since 1996, you’ve heard a generic quasi-rock song on Hot AC radio but were unable to figure out who was performing it, the act in question was probably Matchbox Twenty. The band has built its career on tunes such as “Push” –tracks that are unobjectionable, but…
Since their inception, the Raveonettes have dwelled comfortably within walls of sound. On their previous full-length, Whip It On, those walls were more monolithic than ethereal, more Kevin Shields than Phil Spector. Not so with Pretty in Black. Shorn of distortion and density, the disc’s thirteen tracks glint with a…
Lawmakers should spend less time worrying about men wedding other men and more time disrupting the noisy, unholy marriage of metal and rap. Drums of Death is the latest proposed union in this rocky, decades-old courtship. It succeeds better than most, thanks to the bludgeoning drums of former Slayer drummer…
John Cacianti, otherwise known as John Nathan, sounds like a lonely soul. And not just because his album is titled Party of One, but because almost every song on it traffics in the kind of sad-sack, introspective Americana that George Jones popularized decades ago. Nathan, of course, is no Jones;…
The latest from the Funeral is a good news/bad news/good news situation. The good news is that the trio, which sprang from the corpse of a Texas combo called Belu, exhibits excellent taste in outside material by covering Gang of Four’s “Damaged Goods.” The bad news is that the new…
In Lubbock, Texas, there’s an expression: “Anywhere is walking distance if you have time.” Given the never-ending flatness and unblocked sky that dominates the western stretch of the Lone Star State, it seems better to forgo walking altogether and just drive — double-clutching like a bat out of hell. Then…
Rasputina’s Melora Creager doesn’t refer to her band’s live performances as concerts; she calls them recitals. Which is apt, considering the setup: two cellos, vocals and drums. Resembling some eldritch chamber ensemble, Creager, fellow cellist Zoe Keating and timekeeper Jonathan TeBeest gussy themselves up like Victorian libertines and ply a…
