i hate the sound of guitars

7 mar 2016

Tunabunny – I’ve heard a handful of Tunabunny tracks over the years, but never really got a handle on their identity — and it turns out that’s partly because they operate in at least 2 or 3 different modes. The shorter songs tend to be poppier, sometimes salted with abrupt textural shifts, and [...]

[Read more →]

29 Feb 2016

Flowers – On the new “Everybody’s Dying to Meet You,” Flowers crash back and forth — often several times in the same song — between wispy, semi-acoustic indie/twee pop and fully electrified buzz that often reminds me forcefully both of JAMC’s Lou Reedisms on “Darklands” and The Primitives (Rachel Kenedy’s soprano is airier [...]

[Read more →]

A Note
This isn’t a music criticism blog, it’s a music celebration blog. And while I have enough ego to hope it’s interesting or amusing to some people, it’s as much for me as it is for you: it’s here to satisfy my weird obsession with knowing what I liked best, or at least played most, [...]

[Read more →]

Earth Wind & Fire – Better late than never? “Boogie Wonderland” was one of the first 45s I ever bought, but I never dug deeper. Making up for lost time.

The Astounds – Dunno ’bout you, but I’m relieved the long year-and-a-half with nothing new from Dean Edward Wells is over. In the days when he [...]

[Read more →]

Game Theory – listening to the “Lolita Nation” reish. Many thoughts TK
Svetlanas – Raucous, raunchy Russian punk with English lyrics delivered in a thick, thick – so many trilled r’s! – accent. Vocalist Olga snarls about her body parts like they’re weaponized. I liked the recent EP “Naked Horse Rider” and their half of a [...]

[Read more →]

I don’t know what shape my listening will take until after it’s happened, but three themes emerge from this week:

bands heavily influenced by the earliest explorations into what would eventually become goth, post-punk, and new wave
artists recommended by Jes Skolnik on Twitter (twitter.com/modernistwitch)
artists that I was pretty into 5 or 6 years ago but haven’t [...]

[Read more →]

They Might Be Giants – listened to the most recent kids’ album and the most recent grown-ups’ album, and they sorta blurred together, but I think I liked the former better.
Flesh World – Sort of a sequel band to Brilliant Colors, gothy post-punk (or is that post-punky goth>). I like this, especially the early-Throwing-Muses-gone-shoegaze jitter [...]

[Read more →]

David Bowie – When I was a callow young thing, for a while I refused to listen to any popular music older than 1980. This was a reaction to the calcification of nostalgia, and musical taste frozen in time, but it was dumb, and it was an enforced listen to “Ziggy” that shook me out [...]

[Read more →]

Marti Jones – Revisiting her first two A&M albums with Don Dixon. Jones’ voice, along with Sandy Denny, Linda Thompson, and Sally Timms’, is one of the quintessential ways I define a certain kind of good singer, more about tone than power or histrionic emotional readings, and just really pretty. Dixon’s arrangements veer between the [...]

[Read more →]

Hussalonia -You’re tired of me writing about Hussalonia, probably.
Anti-Flag – The first time I wrote about Anti-Flag they were releasing music on a major label and compromising nothing. 2015 finds them on a Finnish heavy metal label (!) … and compromising nothing
Strike Anywhere – Back when I used to want to be a music critic, [...]

[Read more →]