i hate the sound of guitars

Concluding my preview of Ladyfest Boston:
Playing Saturday night (in alphabetical order)
Daylight Robbery’s more recent tunes find the band growing in subtlety and the use of space. The tunes on their recent 3-way split with Foreign Objects and Defect Defect sound as influenced by New Model Army as by X (for better or worse, Christine Wolf [...]

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Hey, Ladyfest Boston!
Check out most of the artists with a free compilation at bandcamp.
Playing Friday (in alphabetical order)
Beautiful Weekend don’t make it easy to preview their music.
Foreign Objects play short, hard-hitting punk tunes that are often quite catchy despite weird chords and screechy vocals. Nothing against “Words of War” but if you check ‘em out [...]

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So, yeah, Fugazi Live Series.
Joe Gross’s write up in Spin seemed like a reasonable starting point, but I’m going to go a lot deeper, and I’ll update this post with the results of my explorations.
001 1987.09.03 Washington DC, USA, Wilson Center
I’m going to go against conventional wisdom and say that the band’s first gig is [...]

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I really wasn’t sure what to expect. Frankly, the circumstances sounded a bit suspicious: reclusive artist schedules a mid-size tour after a long artistic silence and immediately prior to a career-spanning archive release. But from the first few seconds of “Oh, Comely,” it was impossible for me to see anything disingenuous in Mangum’s performance; further, [...]

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The Lizard Lounge was crammed to the gills for the very welcome work-night friendly early set. Joe Pernice opened with a handful of solo songs, including the title track from Goodbye Killer and “Telescope,” a sneak peek at the in-progress Pernice Brothers album (he said it was mostly too rockin’ to translate well to an [...]

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Holy crap, I haven’t written about Mixtapes before? Really!? I have literally listened to this band more than any other artist this year.
Mixtapes live in a weird intersection between well-produced pop-punk and lo-fi indie pop. On the one hand they have a fatter drum sound than I expect from low-budget indies; on the other, [...]

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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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Hard to slot this into a specific genre, it’s not very “rock” (not in the least “rawk”), largely (but not exclusively electronic). It’s the sort of record in which choices of “which instrument voices this part” seem driven more by sonic coloration than by personnel. There’s a lot going on if you pay close attention [...]

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Department of cheap shots: Does this sound more like Joy Division circa Closer, or like New Order circa Movement? Okay, I’ll concede some Chameleons UK in the mix, too. But the album cover sure screams “Factory!”:

vs., for instance:

p.s. It’s not bad. Just shameless. And the album cover tends to make me discount the “these folks [...]

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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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