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05 Jun 2010 17:59

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Music: Psh, Modest? Portland solidifies place as America’s most indie city

  • Modest Mouse is a cool band and all but we think we’re not alone in think­ing that this paint­ing of lead singer Isaac Brock currently on Portland Mayor Sam Adams’ wall is more than just a little bizarre. source
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24 Apr 2010 19:12

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Music: Saturday Mixtape: Delorean, Dom or Dum Dum?

  • 1. Dan Snaith’s Caribou has consis­tently pleased the critics with the variety of ideas it brings with each album. Last time, it was ‘60s sunshine pop. This time? Disco. In a good (though somber) way. “Odessa” is definitely a catchy, dance­able song, but it feels like a bit more dejected than your average dance record.
  • 2. Feel like MGMT blew it with their second album? Consider switch­ing to Dom, who’s a little more low-rent in their overall sound but hit all of the same pleasure spots on “Living in America” as “Time To Pretend” did three years ago.
  • 3. Delorean sounds like it was pulled out of Ibiza on “Real Love,” and with good reason – they’ve gone a long way to embrace the sound, but not the parts that made the Spanish island the subject of jokes around 2005 or so.
  • 4. Thought Vivian Girls had a good idea but thought the music sucked? Good thing we have Dum Dum Girls as a solid alter­na­tive. Like that band, the angle is poorly-recorded twee pop from an all-girl group. The band even has Vivian Girls’ former drummer. Unlike that band, it’s led by singer Dee Dee, who shines brightly on “I Will Be.”
  • 5. Hunx and His Punx seems to be the other side of the coin from Dum Dum Girls. A girl-group approach to gay-themed pop songs, complete with overly sweaty album cover. It’s a dynamic twist that works surpris­ingly well, actually.
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23 Apr 2010 10:57

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Music: Protip: The National’s new “High Violet” streaming free this weekend

This, of course, is only for fans of anthemic indie rock sung by dudes with really low voices. In other words, everybody. (Right?) source
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27 Mar 2010 19:11

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Music: Saturday Mixtape: We’re suckers for a hazy, summery vibe

  • Summer can’t come soon enough for indie rockers, it seems, because the sound du jour at the moment is a hazy brand of indie rock, much less abrasive than 2008’s noisy lo-fi model (we’re looking at you, No Age and Wavves). Guitars, synths, doesn’t matter: The vibe is key here. And it started with some guy named Ariel Pink.

  • 1. The sad, whining tone of the guitar intro on The Morning Benders’ “Excuses” gives way to a fairly clean sound, but it’s one clearly informed by the calming fuzz of a warm summer day. The Beach Boys wrote the outline, but not the plot, here.
  • 2. They like Neon Indian, they really like him. Last year, the Nintendo-baked project actually drew a degree of success that put it in the forefront of the “chill­wave” movement. It’s a lot more acces­si­ble than some of the other stuff here. In a good way.
  • 3. A buddy of Animal Collec­tive, Ariel Pink never got the criti­cal praise of his mentors, until it became clear that indie’s path was collid­ing into his often-bizarre, noise-worn sounds. This song, one of the hundreds he’s recorded over the years, had a proper release way back in 2004, yet it fits in perfectly here. Hm. With the extra atten­tion (he recently signed to big indie 4AD), expect him to have a solid 2010.
  • 4. Bradford Cox, too, has been around a while between Deerhunter and Atlas Sound, but his last Atlas Sound album “Logos,” has a definite worn-out-summer vibe that fits perfectly here. It’s one not reflected in any of his previ­ous albums, but seems to nail the moment perfectly. When we hear “My Halo,” want to laze out. Seriously.
  • 5. Somewhere, below the layers of noise cover­ing up Best Coast’s “Sun Was High (So Was I),” is a killer hook in a killer female vocal. Like the best hooks, it cuts through, saying “listen to me again.” And usually, we’re forced to comply.
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23 Mar 2010 10:34

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Music: Good night, sweet WOXY: Great internet radio station in flux

  • A sad day for inter­net radio. WOXY, an inter­net station run by Future Sounds (which notably went from terres­trial to online-only), was forced to shut down live broad­casts today. While they could come back to life, it doesn’t sound super-promising based on the message left here. *sigh* If only they were charmed, like Pandora. source
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02 Mar 2010 23:20

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Music: One-word album reviews: We forgot the mainstream bands this week

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08 Dec 2009 21:34

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Music: One-word music reviews: Hey guys! A new feature! Check it out!

  • We like short posts, duh. And we figure you do, too. We also like music. And reading reviews. So every Tuesday, we’re gonna cover a bunch of recent albums using a single word for each. Is the new Spoon album gonna be “consis­tent” or “mediocre”? Keep reading. We’re getting there, guys.
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14 Nov 2009 13:51

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Music: Saturday Mixtape: Our decade in review goes all the way to 2006

  • 1. Tokyo Police Club may have ushered in the era of the blog-buzz band, but that doesn’t mean their first mini-album doesn’t hold up. These Canadians, who weren’t even old enough to drink (in Canada!) at the time, brought a lot of energy to their post-punk stylings, if not a lot to say. Unfortunately, the Black Kids/Pitchfork fiasco can probably be blamed partially on their success.
    2. In 2006, TV on the Radio finally lived up to the potential of their first EP thanks to their amazing second album, “Return to Cookie Mountain,” which is on the shortlist for best album of the decade. “Wolf Like Me” is on the shortlist for their best song. If “Staring at the Sun” didn’t already exist, there’d be no contest.
    3. While Girl Talk’s “Night Ripper” is definitely of a single amazing piece of cloth, “Hold Up” deserves mention simply because it features the best single use of a Weezer song since 1997 – including by Weezer themselves.
    4. The great thing about The Thermals? They sound like a bunch of goofy grown-up kids playing punk rock, but (unlike Tokyo Police Club) the subject matter they tackle is dead serious. On “A Pillar of Salt,” Hutch Harris tackles religion with lyrical book smarts but with the energy of a six-year-old.
    5. If girl-group pop was slowed down to just before the point where the life was completely sucked out of it, you’d have Grizzly Bear’s “Knife,” their calling card into the top tier of indie rock. source
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01 Nov 2009 11:18

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Music: That giddy sound you hear is us freaking out about Spoon

The decade’s most consistently awesome band has another likely solid album, “Transference,” coming out in January. Get ready to swoon over Britt Daniel again. source
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26 Sep 2009 16:16

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Music: Lotsa great music’s come out latetly. Our Saturday Mixtape is on it.

  • 1. We admit that we’ve been quite excited about Monsters of Folk, mostly because of our boy M. Ward. (Nothing against Conor Oberst, but he seems to have lost his edge lately.) The leadoff track, “Dear God (Sincerely M.O.F.),” certainly doesn’t scream folk, but there’s certainly a lot more going on here than an indie equivalent of the Traveling Wilburys.
    2. What if you took the most experimental part of Bon Iver’s “For Emma, Forever Ago” and built a whole album around it? You’d have Volcano Choir‘s “Unmap,” which features frontman Justin Vernon with Milwaukee’s Collection of Colonies of Bees, proving that he’s not the only interesting musician currently coming out of Wisconsin.
    3. Lots to love here. The Big Pink’s “A Brief History of Love” has at least one killer chorus in the form of “Dominos,” which gives a nice sheen to their best shoegaze intentions.
    4. Rain Machine, a.k.a. TV on the Radio’s Kyp Malone, had one of the year’s most-highly-anticipated releases. The album itself isn’t nearly as amazing as the billing, but the vocal theatrics of the otherwise-simple “New Last Name” certainly live up to the pedigree.
    5. On “Higher than the Stars,” The Pains of Being Pure at Heart seem to be ready to cut back the massive amounts of guitar distortion that defined their earlier releases. Even without it – relying more on a cheery synth instead – the formula still works. source
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