i hate the sound of guitars

My Bloody Valentine

Simca Heled and Ed Brewer
I was going to have a classical music*-only week, but I wimped-out part way through. Heled and Brewer get the nod for baroque (not classical … you see the problem?) cello sonatas.
* (for want of a better term)

Ho-Ag

School of Seven Bells
This outfit includes folks from On!Air!Libary! a band I […]

[Read more →]

Slingbacks

The Smittens

Dressy Bessy

The Fall

Giant Sand

Saturday Looks Good to Me

The Crowd Scene
At long lost, the follow-up to Turn Left at Greenland. Now everybody can hear Graham Davies’ gorgeous “You Were Loved” without having to track down the ridiculously obscure Galaxy Hut compliation it originally appeared on. Available from forsquares.com.

Minisnap

The Alarm
In a desperate doomed-to-failure bid to restore […]

[Read more →]

The Capstan Shafts
Canceled the show at T.T. the Bear’s Place, bah. I love them anyways. And fortunately headliners Hallelujah the Hills were worth staying up for.

Bad Brains

I Was Totally Destroying It

45 Grave

Laura Veirs
The Lucksmiths

Sleepyhead
The Alarm
Declaration still quickens my pulse. Bye-bye, hipster cred.

Andrew and Esther are Music
(This is the soundtrack that the songstowearpantsto.com and his bride […]

[Read more →]

Drakkar Sauna
The meta-theme of the week is We Versus the Shark’s wonderful in-progress covers album, Murmurmur. This was the week I made a point of listening to the covered artists I didn’t previously know, and first up was Drakkar Sauna. Drakkar Sauna are somewhere between freak folk and old-time country, and I like them somewhat […]

[Read more →]

Laura Veirs
Hüsker Dü
Robert Pollard
Boston Spaceships
Vivian Girls
The Vivian Girls (great name!) seem to draw on many of the same influences as The Manhattan Love Suicides. I was thinking that I was in MLS’s camp more because of the better production than better songs, but then I got my eardrums exposed to Vivian Girls’ demos, which grabbed […]

[Read more →]

Crass
Marc Riley & The Creepers
I expected to like this ex-Fall project a lot when I finally got around to hearing it, but it reminds me of the short set I saw the Fall do when Mark Smith stumbled off the stage in the middle of a gig — not bad exactly, but without M.E.S. spewing […]

[Read more →]

John Vanderslice
Jonathan Coulton
In Coulton’s “Thing a Week” project, he recorded and released a song every week for a year, which sounds really impressive until you learn about…

Songstowearpants.com/Andrew is Music
…which includes a song a day project. Some are surprisingly good.

Crass
Bewildering that I didn’t spend more […]

[Read more →]

Transistor Transistor
Perhaps Obama’s campaign of hope and change is to blame, perhaps not. But fior whatever reason the harsh intersection of thrash/metal/hardcore isn’t speaking to me now as much as it has in the past few years. Transistor Transistor is an exception. Their new one, Ruined Lives, is aces with me. It’s also less monolithic […]

[Read more →]

Shannon McArdle
ex-Mendoza Line singer’s solo debut did not wow me quite as much as ex Delgado’s solo debut last year, but a pleasant listen and deserving of more time to sink in for sure.

The Fall
Stereo Total
Sarah Dougher
Plushgun
The Magnetic Fields
Shepherdess
Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine
The dB’s
Tie: The Clash, Echo & the Bunnymen, Fugazi, Fuzzy, Giant Sand, Goodnight […]

[Read more →]

Listening this week was largely courtesy of the bulit-in iPod jacks in the Scion Zipcars I rented surrounding my move. Yay built-in iPod jacks!

Laura Veirs
I had heard that Saltbreakers (the only Veirs album I’d previously heard, and a 2007 best-of shortlist) was more rock/less folk than Veirs’ previous work, which put me off exploring further […]

[Read more →]