Con Dolore / This Sad Movie / Clairecords The band's thesis concept is to make a movie using these songs, with each tune representing a single still frame. The album art cleverly echoes the idea with its "movie" of stills; a series of photos of a well-dressed, pretty woman, who leaves a hapless and clueless male to stand openmouthed on the pavement as she speeds away in a cab, relate the standard tale of love and loss. It has to be the smartest cover art I've seen in a while, and hints encouragingly at the disc's contents...more» FEATURED ON THE BOOMBOX!
		The Goblins / Missing Fits / My Pal God Employing Glenn Danzig's own patented "whoa-oh-oh" howling, as well as a thirst for something wicked this way coming, our poorly masked quartet has released an album with two obvious purposes: it's a genuine tribute to The Misfits, and a gruesome dispatch of punk rock terror, Goblins-style. Is it some sort of wicked joke? Or is it disgusting, ill-placed musical mockery? Consider "4 Food Groups", a song with the timeless lyrics, "Flesh...Flesh...Flesh...and Brains!"...more» FEATURED ON THE BOOMBOX!
		The Kingsbury Manx / Let You Down / Overcoat There's no cheese here, just gorgeously understated harmonies, conveying a lyrical simplicity that would chafe if it were handled with any less finesse. "Rustic Stairs", for example, describes rain-induced sleeplessness, yard tidying and waiting for a chance to talk, with such blatant honesty and -- yes -- tenderness that you'll wonder why more bands don't drop the metaphysical bullshit and say what they mean. The attention to detail, the sonambulist's-friend melodies -- everything here seems to work...more» FEATURED ON THE BOOMBOX!
		Ten Speed Racer / Eskimo Beach Boy / Catapult The thought that had been running through my mind while listening to Eskimo Beach Boy ("Wow, this guy sounds like Bono -- except not all self-serious and over-emotive like early U2 or hyper-ironic like later U2 or desperately seeking renewed commercial success like the new U2 -- fronting a hot-shit indie rock band with good ideas and a varied style") made more sense when it turned out that Ten Speed Racer actually are a hot-shit indie rock band from Ireland, with quality control as tight as the Guinness brewery...more» FEATURED ON THE BOOMBOX!
		Trembling Blue Stars / Alive To Every Smile / Sub Pop Alive's first line ("You've got to stop fucking her up/You've got to grow up") succinctly updates the plot for devoted followers of Bobby Wratten's melodic opera; he, the protagonist of his songs, must either move on, or kiss friendship goodbye. The worst case scenario seems inevitable, in these accelerated pop dramas, because you can't worship something, then watch gracefully as it devolves into chitchats about the weather. In "Haunted Days", four minutes of song become a true refuge from acceptance...more» FEATURED ON THE BOOMBOX!
		Bane / Give Blood / Equal Vision The Massachusetts-based group’s much anticipated follow-up to 1999’s It All Comes Down to This is brimming with a ravenous energy that is as infectious as it is devastating. In just over 25 minutes, the group tears through ten hardcore anthems that drill their way into your skull and stay there for days on end. Bane's members may be young and full of zest, but time wasters they most certainly are not -- and they prove this right off the bat, with the barbarous one-two punch of "Speechless" and "Some Came Running"...more»
		Conjunto Bernal / Mi Humilde Corazon / Arhoolie Mi Humilde Corazon compiles the best of the sides the group cut for Ideal records during the sixties, and establishes them as precursors to everything from Joe Ely's Letter to Laredo and Los Lobos' La Pistola y el Corazon to that weird in-between land of Brave Combo and Flaco Jiminez. It's fascinating, to say the least, with dramatic twists on the bolero and ranchero styles that make all of roots music appear to emanate from their work. Of course, this overstates their true influence...more»
		dilute / The Gypsy Valentine Curve / 54º 40' or Fight Measure for measure, The Gypsy Valentine Curve surprises and delights, keeping listeners off-balance and eerily intrigued. Feeling no compunction to obey a strict verse/chorus format -- or, for that matter, song structure of any sort -- San Francisco's dilute merrily elicits feedback and keeps the groove firmly in hand, in much the same way that the Velvet Underground used to do. Displaying a knack for making even bum notes sound intentional, dilute also pays tribute to Pavement's work with arrhythmic noise-rock and The Pixies' penchant for bleating vocals...more»
		The Dragons / Rock N Roll Kamikaze / Junk Even by the standards of White Blood Cells or Is This It, The Dragons' sound extremely raw -- which, presumably, is how they like it. Regardless of how well the album is produced, nothing can hide the fact that lead singer Mario Escovedo sounds like he emerged from the womb with a bottle of whiskey and a pack of cigarettes. The guitars behind him are charged with a primal swagger, aiming straight for the jugular, and wasting no time on fills or pointless arpeggios...more»
		In The Nursery / Engel / ITNCorp ITN's soundtrack-friendly neo-classicism has never sounded better; even when you know that the majority of their compositions are sample-based, it's hard to listen to pieces like "Beutereiter" and "Gabrielites" without assuming the Humberstones had a full orchestra at their disposal. The steady improvement of sampling technology has enhanced ITN's sound dramatically; Engel doesn't merely ring true -- some of its more powerful passages could give David Arnold a run for his money...more»
		Inuit / The Enabler / Dyspepsidisc The case that can often be made against noodlin' guitar punk bands is that they take a long time to go nowhere. Inuit, on the other hand, always seems to be heading or spiraling somewhere; their songs naturally pulsate in and out of the sort of moody climaxes that we've come to expect from the Midwest. Accordingly, all of the adjectives that are used when talking about noodlin' punk -- chill, relaxed, groovy, loungy, frolicsome -- apply here, though the music is still above and beyond these characteristics...more»
		Maestro Echoplex / Last Night I Saw God on the Dance Floor / Android Eats The Maestro traffics in the same sort of smart, acoustic, folky ballads that such well-known chaps as Will Oldham and Bill Callahan have made their living purveying. Although the Maestro possesses neither the creepy backwoods air that suffuses much of the former's work, nor quite as much of the existential dread that hovers over the latter's canon (although he has a death obsession that a professional might wish to look into), he can stand alongside these accomplished tunesmiths with no worries...more»
		Mayor McCA / Me Is He / Sonic Unyon A one man musical oddity, Mayor McCA (formerly known as CA Smith) lives in a world all his own. Sometimes he's a hard character to grasp. Stylistically, he's all over the place; one minute he's the reincarnated spirit of The Beatles, the next he's rhyming like Beck working on a sequel to "Loser". Then, in the blink of an eye, he becomes a new member of Wilco, singing country-tinged songs of longing. It's almost as if CA is trying to irritate listeners -- but it's not working on me...more»
		Justin Mikulka / Move Toward the Exit / One Mad Son If Mikulka had attempted to stretch the sound of disc's opening track, "Whores and Love", into an entire album, I'd have spent the rest of this review scolding him. Fortunately, he drops the rasp-and-twang and heads for more challenging territory. In "Kept", he attempts a post-grunge power ballad, with surprisingly solid results. By rights, nothing that sounds like "Kept" should work; it's been beaten to death by alt-rock radio. However, because Mikulka avoids the vocal histrionics that push most artists over the top, the song sounds honest...more»
		Old Time Relijun / Witchcraft Rebellion / K The band's moniker is apt; the music has a very raw, primordial feel as if it were bubbling from some hidden crack in the Earth's crust. Over the course of thirteen tracks, Arrington de Dionyso, Aaron Hartman and The Microphones' Phil Elvrum -- none of them strangers to weird-ass, eccentric music -- create a sound that is the sonic equivalence of an epileptic fit. Guitar, drums, horns and bass convulse as one instrument, occasionally fitting together but more often than not careening off of one another like charged particles...more»
		Petland / Miss Roboto / Self-Released Petland has been building the new-millennium equivalent of "street cred" at garageband.com ("e-cred"? "Web-cred"? "Inter-cred"? Never mind.). Their sophomore long-player finds the band indulging their pop-rock-by-way-of-electronica bent in the creation of a semi-concept album that is not nearly as self-conscious as that description implies. The "concept", such as it is, seems to involve a boy creating a robot girl and then either destroying or being destroyed by or somehow fusing with her...more»
		Pharaoh Overlord / #1 / Tumult Much like the toxic sludge that all of humanity's waste eventually becomes, Finland’s Pharaoh Overlord have distilled thirty years of rock music into a slow, blistering, bubbling, psychedelic ooze. As the ooze slowly moves through your ears, familiar objects gradually reveal themselves, like a bastard aura hovering above the monotonous blobs of the group's repetitive dirges. While this contamination of the brain may make you a little uneasy at first, it makes a lot more sense once the chemicals begin to take hold...more»
		Sufjan Stevens / Enjoy Your Rabbit / Asthmatic Kitty Although hyper-glitchy noise barrages are getting pretty old by now, Stevens injects just enough stability into his tweak-fests to keep your ears involved in the evolving forms he's spinning. The sounds are mostly electronic, and while there are lots of the harsh, buzzy sounds we've come to expect, there are also plenty of rich, warm, fuzzy bits, singing voices, orchestral hits and even the occasional plucked string or trumpet note, all of which help make this a surprisingly warm sounding disc...more»