"The Winter of Mixed Drinks"
Frightened Rabbit
"The Suburbs"
Arcade Fire
"Soundtrack To The End"
Communist Daughter
"Crazy For You"
Best Coast
"Treats"
Sleigh Bells
"Silver Soul"
Beach House
"Little Secrets"
Passion Pit
"Unhinged"
Eels
"Black Smoke"
Tindersticks
Listen, Dammit, has a fondness for wrenching break-up songs — sad bastard music, as it’s sometimes known — and this one’s a gem: “Nobody Told Me” by Canadian singer Barzin. It’s from his third album “Notes on an Absent Lover,” a title that speaks volumes before you even hear a note. “Nobody Told Me” finds [...]
Just give it 15 seconds. That’s how long it takes on the first song on “Heatwave” (So TM), the debut EP from Minneapolis trio Total Babe, for the band to outpace countless other groups comprising teenagers still in high school. The timid acoustic guitar and tentative drums that open “Bearbones” give way to tight, punchy [...]
Ever since former Stray Cat and perpetual rockabilly revivalist Brian Setzer got himself mixed up with the small army of horn players that make up his eponymous orchestra, he’s applied his considerable talents to a range of projects, some inspired, others ill conceived. For every “The Dirty Boogie,” his zeitgeist-capturing 1998 swing-abilly triumph, there’s been [...]
This is one of those cases where the name doesn’t give a full picture of the band: Resin Hits sounds like some third-rate jam band for right-on dudes who love hacky sack. Yet the group’s music is pretty much the opposite of that. The California band, led by Daniel Hukill, plays full-throttle garage rock with [...]
The Flaming Lips have never stopped being gloriously weird. It’s become a calling card of sorts that encompasses the band’s albums, trippy movies and riotous live shows complete with confetti and animal costumes. The group’s past few releases have largely resembled the stage shows: they’ve been busy, vibrant, color-saturated affairs with the loony energy of [...]
Just because the Dinosaur Jr. reconciliation is working out beyond anyone’s expectations doesn’t mean that Lou Barlow doesn’t still have musical ideas outside the scope of the Amherst, Mass., band. The once-and-future Dinosaur bassist — who has also kept busy with Sebadoh and Folk Implosion — follows his own muse on “Goodnight Unknown” (Merge), his [...]
Four albums in, the Raveonettes are still more comfortable sharing what they like — Phil Spector, film noir, fuzz pedals, the Jesus and Mary Chain, “Twin Peaks” and a hyper-stylized vision of American teenage culture between the years of 1956 and, say, 1963 — than what they are like. That’s assuming, of course, there’s more [...]
After the wrenching catharsis of the Mountain Goats’ 2005 album “The Sunset Tree,” John Darnielle’s songwriting took a quieter, almost weary turn — and no wonder. The songs on “The Sunset Tree” were highly personal accounts of his abusive stepfather, and Darnielle’s next couple albums reflected the exhaustion he must have felt after coming to [...]
It’s not that Built To Spill was making bad albums. But since 1999’s Keep It Like a Secret,” the Idaho guitar-rockers didn’t seem overly inspired in the studio, turning out a handful of records that were good in the moment, if not particularly memorable. The band’s live shows were another story: Built To Spill in concert [...]
They describe themselves as “gaze-grunge,” and there is an element of ’90s guitar crunch to Delaware duo the Sky Drops. But that’s not all there is. What belies the genre description is the joyous undercurrent running through the band’s songs — these aren’t the morose self-recriminations of Grunge Mark I on “Truth Is” and “Swimming [...]
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