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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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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“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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The Death Set fuse fast, guitar-based pop with electronic and and hip-hop-influenced conventions; they remind me (thanks in part to some sneery vox) of The Beastie Boys (or P.W.E.I.) if they hadn’t switched from punk to hip-hop/electro but had completely integrated the forms. Michel Poiccard may alienate a few fans who preferred the thin, even [...]

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In places these extremely young Danish punks reminds me powerfully of the proto-Joy Division band Warsaw. Or, more accurately, the band Warsaw might have become if, instead of getting slower and chillier, they’d gotten faster and more abrasive. There’s a crazy physicality to this release; sometimes the band seems to be fighting with itself, using [...]

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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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Andrew Jackson Jihad definitely put the “punk” attitude into folk punk. Candy . . . reminds me of the first Violent Femmes albums, only more: faster, more frenetic, more impassioned (Sean Bonnette’s aspiration-heavy voice has a timbre that at times sharply recalls The Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle or The Thermals’ Hutch Harris) and much, much [...]

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