i hate the sound of guitars

artists of the week: 13ghosts, masshysteri, the vicious, gorilla angreb
My friend Joe has been lately been mentioning some unjustly overlooked best-of-decade candidates. His first pick was 13ghost’s Cicada. After only a spin and a half, I’m not prepared to say “best of decade,” but it deserves more attention for sure, and I might eventually decide [...]

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Artist of the Week: Arctic Monkeys
On my first trip through Humbug I had the impression that Arctic Monkeys had done an about-face: laddish, spastic bursts like “I Bet You Look Good on the Dance Floor,” were traded for slower, moodier, much more subtle (and, to me, interesting) compositions that evoke Spoon and Sparklehorse (while somehow [...]

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Artist of the Week: Fugazi
I listened to Chunklet’s entire 45-minute assemblage of Fugazi stage patter. It seems to be drawn mostly from the Fugazi shows available to download from archive.org, but it has most of the classic bits, wrapping up, of course, with “ice cream-eating motherfucker.”
Things that it made me think:

Fugazi has long been dogged [...]

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Artist of the Week: Voice of the Beehive
I blame this on my going on a Voivod kick a few weeks back, I think I saw the Voice of the Beehive discs, and the thought of wanting to hear them gradually wormed into the brain, with the the idea of answering two questions:

Was the first record [...]

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Artist of the Week: Franklin Bruno
I’m going to give in to the temptation to compare Bruno’s Local Currency to The Mountain Goats rarities compilations like Protein Source of the Future…Now!, on account of them sharing superficial attributes like having a lot of tracks (22 in this instance), featuring witty, brief, and somewhat self-deprecating liner notes, [...]

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