Hopes and Fears
The first time I heard Keane, I was struck by the intense familiarity of their music. Not familiar in the generic "oh I've heard this…
Love Everybody
The Presidents of the United States of America have always made really great pop songs, unabashedly immature in lyrical content but surprisingly smart and incredulously…
Haulers
Our young Mr. Dave Schoonderbeek (is that Dutch?) from Toronto has undergone a number of re-incarnations, artistically speaking. Starting with what he describes as 'angry…
Blue Cathedral
As a fan of psychedelic rock, I was expecting to have my head blown off by Blue Cathedral, the latest release by Comets on Fire.…
Pretend You're Alive
Melodic-emotional pop abounds! A perennial favorite of teenage boys, it compresses melancholy and gentle beauty into power chords and cymbal crashes. Lovedrug provides a textbook…
The Mur Murs EP
If you ask Ebb and Flow how they would describe themselves, they would likely rattle off "a prog-ind-moog-soul-crazyhorse-kraut-fakejazz-slowpop mystery band," which is one too many…
Milk Man
Okay. A bloody frig'n mess, Deerhoof and a Milk Man sleeping in the nude, means what? Good question. With Deerhoof's "Milk Man" we have a…
The Dirty South
A red-state band with blue-state tendencies, the Drive-By Truckers devote most of their latest album to tales of the disadvantaged. The band come stomping out…
Iowa Anvil
It's quite inevitable to compare this one man band (Seattleite Louis O'Callaghan) to Nick Drake, Elliot Smith and Grant Lee Phillips... so, there it is.…
Tyrannosaurus Hives
The roaring Hives are back! The Swedish five-piece that stormed the revival of the garage rock movement like a ball of fire — claiming to…