i hate the sound of guitars

Classics of Love – Classics of Love
Classics of Love falls into the general category of punk veterans — in this case Operation Ivy’s Jesse Michaels — forming retro 80s/punk/hardcore bands. I’m pretty susceptible to this trend, and Classics of Love is no exception. Nothing here is quite as amazing as “No Return” from 2009’s “Waiting [...]

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Behold! the Monolith – Defender, Redeemist
This trio bludgeons almost equally well at the tempo of an advancing glacier or at a jackhammer thrash pace (Motorhead comparisons bruited about in the press for this ‘un really do make sense). Veteran metal producer/engineer Billy Anderson turns in a recording that’s amazing in it’s cake/eat-it-tooness: crushingly heavy at [...]

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bellwire – “Waterbed” (EP)
Note: we’re not likely to make a practice of this. It’s against our charter. But the band bellwire reached out to us and invited us to listen to their music, and they made that easy and they weren’t rude about it. So we did. And it was pretty good. We decidedly liked [...]

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Alcest – Les Voyages de L’Âme
I’m not usually fond of post-anything genre labels. How can anything be post-rock? There’s still plenty of rock. But Alcest really is post-metal, in the sense that it used to be identifiably a metal act, and now it isn’t. This is shoegaze/dreampop for guitar tone freaks. If you’ve listened Pale [...]

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