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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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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The lead single from Please and Thank You manges to be simultaneously sweet, creepy, and poignant in a character portrait of uncommon economy. The song’s narrator is moving in with his sweetie. If we take him at his word, he’s literally drooling at the thought of a live-in friend-with-privileges, which is at least a [...]

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Glasgow’s Nanobots sound pretty much like they could have fallen through a time warp from the very early 80’s — before New Wave got slick and commercial (or even sharply differentiated from punk). It makes perfect sense that they’ve been opening lately for the current edition of the Rezillos, and I didn’t need to hear [...]

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I show no signs of getting tired of bands that worship at the temple of The Fall’s early days: ungainly lurch, quirky lyrics, atonal-but-strangely-catchy — I can’t get enough. S-S-S-Spectres’ “Witches vs. Wolves” might sound like a runner-up in a fake Fall album/song-title contest, but it made me say “what the heck?” in the its [...]

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