i hate the sound of guitars

On the A-side, Lemuria offer two more examples of the smart, catchy, indie rock that’s made Pebble one of my most-played albums of the year so far. I expected their side to be swell, and it delivers. But the revelation here for me is Cheap Girls’ “Pure Hate.” I’m not quite sure what “And I/Keep [...]

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New Order would decidely have struck me as a useful point of reference for Idle Labor even if the cover art didn’t recall Power, Corruption & Lies. As it is, I’m wondering if they want to get threatening letters from some lawyer. Craft Spells’ flowers are less gloomy, of course, and so is their music. [...]

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“The Crassical Collection” is currently my favorite first-wave punk-band remaster series. Not only do the albums all come with gobs of bonus material, facsimile of the original art, and booklets jammed with essays, lyrics, art, and photos, but the new slip cases will join up to make a giant acid-washed Crass logo when my collection [...]

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Usually a garage/psychedelic record, even one as well executed as this, wouldn’t make big claims on my listening time. This does, for two reasons. First, it’s got an enough indie rock flavor to hold my interest (Coni Duchess sounds enough like Kim Gordon, ’specially on lines like “I wanna kiss the future,” (”Under the Woods”) [...]

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Scratchy, aggressively lo-fi production and the rough/smooth interplay between Ian Svenonius and a veritable harem of female back-up singers (Tara Jane O’Neil and Finally Punk’s Veronica Ortuño among them) are the wires baling this unruly garage rock/soul/funk/blues conglom. Not all of it works for me, but highlights like the rave-up “Detroit Music,” its instrumental sequel [...]

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Recently I was wondering what happened to the folks from Salad, a mid-90s power-poppish britpop act that never got as much traction as Sleeper, let alone Elastica, despite having some catchy tunes and the presumed advantage of an MTV VJ as a frontwoman. I couldn’t find anything recent from guitarist/tunesmith Paul Kennedy, but his singer/writing [...]

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You’ve got just about a month left to place an order from Asaurus Records, the micro-indie label that releases beautiful hand-packaged CDRs from the likes of Pants Yell!, Colin Cleary, The Mathletes, and many more. There’s a very generous selection of free tracks to download, too. Among the “I Hate the Sound of Guitars”-endorsed discs [...]

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I’m going to link MySpace pages in this post. I feel like it’s a little irresponsible to do that without mentioning a more-or-less safe way to follow the links. Here’s what I recommend for visiting MySpace:

Set up a browser (or browser profile) to delete all cookies on exitI like to configure Opera up for [...]

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More justification for my usual laggardly approach to putting together the year-end mixes: If I’d put my 2007 list together midway through January, it definitely would’ve included Les Ondes Silencieuses, represented probably by “Echoes and Coral,” or “Sea of Tranquility.”
Colleen (real name: Cécile Schott)’s story would be intriguing even if I didn’t love the music. [...]

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Here are some things that Dean Edward Wells, a.k.a. The Capstan Shafts, doesn’t have:

Fancy recording equipment
A rock-solid sense of timing
Rabid perfectionism about the recording process
Long songs

Here are some things that Dean Edward Wells does have:

A prodigious bounty of catchy melodies and riffs
A bevvy of quirky lyrics set to the former
A pretty good singing voice
A modicum [...]

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