i hate the sound of guitars

Lesser bands could stretch the musical ideas Standard Fare crams into the 3 minutes of the A-side into an EP, or even an entire album. Every time the fast, bright, choppy, guitar chords return I think “Smiths!” but, there’s a whole lot more going on. In fact, if you charted all the changes this tune [...]

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The Hussalonia Founder generally puts a strange spin on each of his many recordings. The main gimmick here is that the original guitar and vocal guide tracks were erased after the overdubs were done, with a new vocal recorded responding to the overdubs. As the founder describes it, the process leaves “a void at the [...]

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A fascinating album that evokes the breadth of Harvey’s catalogue — she makes some use of the fragile, high register she first explored on 2007’s White Chalk and there are vestiges of the percussive guitar attack that drove her earliest albums — but ultimately sounds like nothing else in it. In “On Battleship Hill” her [...]

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Spacious indie chamber pop with genuinely odd arrangements (i.e., French horn is featured, but not the most unusual element), anchored by Jessie Stein’s winningly fragile, slightly unsteady vocals. Reminds me, perhaps obliquely, of Colleen (Cécile Schott), if Colleen’s music were recast (just barely) as rock; Stein’s vocals make me think of Life Without Building’s [...]

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with The Ackleys:
The Ackleys (2005); Forget Forget, Derive Derive (EP, 2006)
Indie-power-pop. Splashy drums, some keyboards give it a slightly new-wave sheen.
as King Everything:
The Drought (2008)
Mostly acoustic guitar/vocal
with P.S. Eliot:
The Bike Wreck Demo (2008, read about Bike Wreck demo here), Introverted Romance in Our Troubled Minds (2009), Living in Squalor (EP, 2010, pay-what-you-want download), Sadie (2011)
Except [...]

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Not to slight the other tunes on The Baseball Project’s Volume 2: High and Inside, many more of which (especially Scott McCaughey’s eerie “Here Lies Carl Mays” and Steve Wynn’s rollicking “The Straw that Stirs the Drink”) are also quite swell. But “Buckner’s Bolero” is something else again, a powerful early entrant for the [...]

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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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I’m breaking a cardinal rule to write about Darren Hayman (ex-Hefner)’s January Songs project before it’s actually finished, so you have a chance to snag a handful of the tunes in their brief free download window, coz, frankly, owning this album could be a bit expensive for yanks at the Bandcamp going rate. But if [...]

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The legendary Ed’s Basement shows were before my time as a New Englander, but I suspect their vibe was perfectly nailed based on my experience with house shows, loosely curated open mike nights, and underground clubs and art spaces. Last Saturday evening at TT’s felt like a Sunday afternoon or Tuesday night at one of [...]

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It was just about a month ago that I became aware of the self-described “pop music cult” Hussalonia, and since then I’ve listened to Hussalonia songs about 350 times. Even more surprising, I’m showing no signs of getting sick of them.
Partly this is because Hussalonia is really good*, partly it’s because they (mostly just he [...]

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