i hate the sound of guitars

Preludes makes me think of Metric, not because I Was Totally Destroying It sound like Metric — they mostly don’t, although “Fight/Flight” does a bit — but because Preludes feels like the kind of leap that Metric made between Grow Up And Blow Away and Fantasies: the elements are the same, but everything is in [...]

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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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Longtime readers will know that my love for all things Big Dipper-related is even more boundless and unconditional than my love for most things GBV-related, so maybe it’s inevitable that my (stratospheric) expectations for this project weren’t quite met by the first listen. The Bob Pollard/Gary Waleik balance seems a bit more skewed toward the [...]

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I’m glad I know that Rodriguez (a.k.a. “ER”) started work on his solo album You Are Released contemporaneously with work on The Beatings’ Late Season Kids, because otherwise I’d worry: it doesn’t seem like a good sign when songs this good, and this stylistically similar to the main band, go to the side project instead. [...]

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Parts & Labor have always had this push-pull thing: enticing listeners with catchy melodies and repulsing them (at least the unadventurous ones*) with screechy, hissy, treble overdrive. (Key listening game with P&L: is that noise made by a guitar or a keyboard?) Constant Future ramps up the pop quotient a bunch and tames the noise [...]

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Bands that basically sound like Mogwai are practically their own genre by now, so presumably you have an opinion on the master template. Hardcore Will Never Die But You Will offers few surprises (and certainly nothing I’d call hardcore). “San Pedro” and “George Square Thatcher Death Party” flirt with conventional rock tempos and drum strucutres; [...]

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I wound up with this odds & ends collection on the strength of a friend’s recommendation and sympathy for the band’s recent broken-down-tour-van plight; it’s perhaps an odd way to be introduced to an act, but I’ve decidedly been enjoying it. Murder by Death could loosely be classed as Americana, but only loosely; prominent use [...]

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On my first time through this seemed to have less distorted guitar/shoegaze goodness than prior efforts, and Yuki Chikudate’s vocals struck me as a bit more thin and chirpy than I recalled. On second listen, with the volume up a little more, I don’t hear what bugged me at all. My favorite track is “Trance [...]

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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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This weekend my brain was p0wned by Pellet Gun’s version of Led Zeppelin’s “Rock and Roll” (from last year’s From the Land of Ice and Snow a mostly northwest indie rock tribute project with unlikely participants like Laura Veirs, Rebecca Gates, and Chris Walla. Jealous Butcher has the hook-up).
In Pellet Gun’s hands the song is [...]

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