i hate the sound of guitars

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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The groupthink consensus on Content seems to be something like “not bad, but not as good as Entertainment!*” This seems fundamentally unfair; I think a better question is, “is it as good as Mall** or Shrinkwrapped***?” Content leaves Mall cringing in the gutter, and while Shrinkwrapped had some lovely unruly moments from guitarist Andy Gill, [...]

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Ventriloquizzing’s combo of low-register, talky, and somewhat menacing vocal delivery with jittery indie funk reminds me of early Shriekback. A lot. Enough for me to mostly overlook that the lyrics are not much to my taste (repetitive, leaning on familiar phrases and imagery, and in the case of “Sixteen Shades of Black & Blue,” unpleasant). [...]

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