i hate the sound of guitars

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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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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