"We call it heart-quaking doom pop," says Neil Popkin of the sound of WAR TAPES' first full length album, THE CONTINENTAL DIVIDE, set for release on May 26 by Seattle-based indie Sarathan Records.The foursome includes Neil Popkin (singer/rhythm guitarist, from Boston), his sister Becca Popkin (bassist, also from Boston), Matt Bennett (lead guitar, from Hawaii) and William Mohler (drummer, from SoCal). They've been raking in rave reviews since their 2006 live debut, and the early buzz on War Tapes earned airplay on such tastemaker radio stations as BBC Radio 1 and Live 105 in San Francisco, while "Dreaming of You" was aired on NBC's New Year's Eve with Carson Daly (and "The Night U...
The timeless sound of the aptly named "The Deep Dark Woods" belongs to the depressing winters of the north. Pulsing with human warmth, these original songs echo through the lonesome night. Ryan Boldt's plainspoken lyrics offer a strong but gentle tone which understates poetry, oftentimes as startling as hot blood in fresh snow. Despite the dark themes, the heaviness never overwhelms the music's playfulness. An utterly fun rhythm section, brilliant guitar work, and eerily rich harmonies drive the songs. One could easily be forgiven for mistaking their songs as treasures of decades past, as The Deep Dark Woods approach their instruments with studied respect for the honoured traditions of the shadowy side of roots...
As the nineties come to a close, more extreme forms of music continue to bleed together, resulting in dynamic new sounds and unique new hybrids of expression that stand apart from the faceless sea of followers. Such is the path that Kansas City's Coalesce have taken.The trio of guitarist Jes Steineger, bassist Stacy Hilt, and drummer Jim Redd formed coalesce in January 1994. They shared similar underground hardcore influences and a desire to experiment with odd time signatures, discordant riffing patterns, and controlled dissonance.Vocalist Sean Ingram joined during the Easter of '94, the band chose coalesce as their moniker, and entered Red House Studios with producer Ed Rose (who would go on to produce all their future ma...
Every so often over the past few years you'd hear a whisper about this new Brooklyn band featuring a couple of indie rock veterans. Supposedly they'd been practicing since 2006, but weren't ready to play live yet. Then they finally did play and immediately a bootleg recording of that first show spread all over the web. In lieu of having anything recorded for people to hear, the band even put some of the songs on its MySpace page.But little did Obits know how much the listening public was clamoring to hear more. With only the bootleg to go on, bloggers tried to fill in the blanks with comparisons both apt and not. They don't really sound that much like Creedence, maybe a little. Who knows what the people at Sub Pop...
You probably know this much already: Teenage Bottlerocket (or simply "TBR" to their fans) is currently one of the hottest bands in punk rock and their new record, They Came From The Shadows, is highly-anticipated. But before we go any further you should probably know that they're from Wyoming. Crazy, huh? Although more famous for its frontier forts and characters like Butch Cassidy, the "Front Range" (as it's known to the locals) may very well be the unlikely home to the next great punk rock band. At least that's what the kids are sayin'. But don't take our word for it, even Alternative Press featured them as a "Band You Need To Know in 2009"... and they don't even have those Jennif...
King of Jeans. The title of Pissed Jeans' third album and second for Sub Pop conjures their essence perfectly--masters of the mundane, beasts of the banal, high priests of the humdrum. These four, white, male high school graduates hardly look further than their own appendages for artistic inspiration, content to execute their own brand of brash and heavy punk music in the Joe Carducci-approved standard rock formation of guitar, bass, drums and vocals. From simple minds and simple fabrics comes this King of Jeans, perhaps also a slight nod to the variety of Pissed Jeans-inspired groups that have crawled up since 2007's Hope for Men. After all, there can be only one.If 2005's Shallow was Pissed Jeans coping...
In an underground music landscape where 140 characters equals "journalism" and lone MP3s propel bands to momentary internet stardom, bands are here today and gone tomorrow.Califone is a band that defies this blueprint. Their albums are full of layers and textures, offering endless depth, entire universes to lose yourself in - and beyond the thick spectrum of sound, they do something even more important: They write great songs. Califone is a band that will stand the test of time.The band is at the peak of its powers on All My Friends Are Funeral Singers, its sixth song based album. The long-awaited follow-up to 2006's acclaimed Roots and Crowns, the album is the strongest collecti...
Nosferatu D2 are two brothers from Croydon, the deep south of south London. Their influences include classic lo-fi records, 90's Seattle grunge, Will Oldham, Smog, The Afghan Whigs, Arab Strap, Sonic Youth, Biffy Clyro & The Fall. They have played with the likes of Los Campesinos!, been reviewed by NME & Drowned in Sound and been played by XFM, Radio 1 and Chris Chinchilla (of Art Brut)....
Born to soiled genes and a small northern town playing second fiddle to the despair-Mecca of Blackpool, life was never going to be all beer and skittles for Benjamin Shaw. After a period of particular awfulness and a short descent into madness, he awoke sober one lunchtime to find himself happily married and living in Melbourne, Australia. So with steps full of spring and a newly gained ‘can-do' spirit, the happy couple seized the day and followed their hearts up the river of golden dreams, all the way to a tiny, grey, one-bedroom flat in North London. Lurching from one disastrous Customer Service job to the next, and each day turning to nought but filth, there was one of two paths Shaw could take to escape - eithe...
Heather Renee is a singer/songwriter in the vein of Regina Spektor, Feist, and Priscilla Ahn. She has been rising up in the ranks of her unique genre...Indie Folk Pop.Love is her message and she uses her music to spread it to the world....
Fang Island describes its sound as "everyone high-fiving everyone." And, the Brooklyn quintet's anthemic and soaring songs make it quite possibly one of few bands befitting such description.Its finger-tapping guitar lines, chanted vocals, triumphant harmonies and overall perky songs hearken to the sort of "Total Music" of the Fucking Champs, Jay Reatard, Ponytail, Kraftwerk, Marnie Stern, Thin Lizzy, et al. But, perhaps more so, its songs are like the music in your head at that moment when everything feels just right: that first kiss, that high score on the video game, buying your first small nation in cash... you know, good stuff. Fang Island began, oddly enough, as an art school projec...
It was a depressive and drunken night when Den Saakaldte was born. Alkohol made things clear. Den Saakaldte was born back in May of 2006, under the candlelight and the light of the 5th fullmoon. The project started as a "one man band" project, by Sykelig. It's only purpose? ...To be the way for expressing the paranoia, depression and alkohol influenced thoughts of the individual. Den Saakaldte as a meaning, stands for every person that is not or doesn't feel a part of the "normal" society.Sykelig recorded the first two songs in Hellas and after that relocated once and for good to Norway. There after experiencing weird situations and after having interesting new points of view in life, Sykelig j...
A Conversation with Sérgio Dias of Os MutantesBefore the long-running style Musica Popular Brasileira settled in as Brazil's national favorite, evolved a form of boundary-shattering multi-dimensional pop art music called Tropicalia. A combination of classical, folk, rock, samba, and bossa nova, Tropicalia thrived in the governmentally terrorized country for only a brief period.In the mid-60s leading the way of this music was the giddily experimental Os Mutantes, which bega...
Lucero's sixth studio album and major label debut, 1372 Overton Park, is due October 6 on Universal Republic Records. Produced by Ted Hutt (The Gaslight Anthem) and featuring horn arrangements by legendary Memphis session player Jim Spake (Al Green, John Hiatt, Solomon Burke, Cat Power), the record marks a decided turn toward the Memphis soul sound that has long informed the band's records from afar. 1372 Overton Park follows the band's 2006 release, Rebels, Rogues & Sworn Brothers, hailed by Pitchfork as "the best showcase for the band's taut dynamic yet." After a run of festival and club dates this summer, Lucero will tour throughout the fall in support of the new album with the Lucero Ramblin' R...
Sometimes the best way to deal with a break-up is to write a batch of great songs about it, turn up the amplifiers and just rock out.Think of enduring classics - from Liz Phair's Exile In Guyville to Nine Inch Nails' Pretty Hate Machine to Beck's Sea Change - and how they achieved musical catharsis from the crumbling walls and crossbeams of a relationship gone bad. On their latest release, Forget And Not Slow Down, Relient K carry the break-up album into the 21st century, tweaking it with clear-eyed songwriting and a four-to-the-floor optimism that is positively refreshing. Yes, there's sweet sorrow in "...
Sweden-based El Perro Del Mar, known informally as Sarah Assbring, is set to release her third full-length album Love Is Not Pop (The Control Group) on October 20, 2009. Following the album release, El Perro Del Mar will be supporting Peter Bjorn and John on their North American tour in November as well as playing a couple of headlining shows of her own."Both dramatic and playful, the result sounds lovably gentle and impeccably crafted: Assbring conveys vulnerability and pain without histrionics. A sweetly simple, gorgeous song." - NPR Song Of The Day"Mixing tears with sugary sound effects, she wallows with Scandinavian style." - New York Times"Achingly genui...
"Tom Petty, Springsteen, Neil Young, and Pearl Jam...these are the people I look to," says Chris Carrabba, the creative force behind Dashboard Confessional. "They do what they want and follow their hearts, going wherever their music is taking them. I look to those guys, and I start to think: how does it work for them? What were they holding on to, and do I hold on to that as well?"With the release of his fifth full-length album Alter The Ending, the Boca Raton, Florida resident is no longer simply an up-and-coming musician; he's a career artist. Alter is certainly the most defining album of what has already been a remarkable career; on one end, it's a return to the full band so...
Beautiful Small Machines may be synthetic, but they're not stupid. Caught somewhere between the 70's, 80's and deep space, this electro-pop duo learned about comedy from adult swim and heartache from Philip K. Dick and they're spewing it all back out at you like a bunch of mandroids on whiskey and psycho-pharmaceuticals. Fun, Sad, Creepy and Clever - Beautiful Small Machines is the retro-future.Forging a successful writing partnership over 10 years ago during the making of Bree Sharp's debut "A Cheap and Evil Girl", which featured the wryly-scripted cult hit "David Duchovny", Don DiLego (Lonestar Hitchhiker - Universal Records) and Bree have gone on to work on several records together, which ha...
Five Finger Death Punch are ready for battle.Their new sophomore album, War Is the Answer, is locked and loaded with twelve tracks of raw epic heavy metal. Released September 22nd 2009 via Prospect Park/EMI, the record's deafening battle cry will undoubtedly rattle the genre to its very core and pull listeners deep into this War. Many were surprised to see the meteoric yet steady rise that 5FDP undertook in the last two year, and that was just the beginning. 5FDP have embarked on quite the journey to reach this point. The Los Angeles quintet's assault on heavy music began in 2007 with the release of their hit debut The Way of the Fist. After forming a "dream team" of metal musicians, t...
Music critics who have witnessed the eye-popping spectacle that is a Cage the Elephant live performance have likened the band's singer to many things, among them "a demented Bible Belt preacher," "a Tasmanian devil whooping and jumping up and down like a frenzied gibbon." And that's just frontman Matt Shultz. The verdict? "Exhilarating, 100 mph stuff," raved British indie music bible NME about one of the group's UK gigs last fall. Cage the Elephant's raucous live show - which made this red-hot Kentucky-bred band the talk of this year's South-by-Southwest music festival, and led USA Today to single them out as a band not to miss at 2009's Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival - is the p...
Edward Sharpe And The Magnetic Zeros are a musical collective led by Alex Ebert making big, open-hearted anthems that evoke a different era when cynicism and irony didn't course through pop music like countermelodies. The band's aesthetic, no matter how contemporary and organic its evolution, screams '60s psychedelia and '70s boho-rock right down to touring in a converted school bus with the band's name in script on the side and a driver named Cornfed.These feel good sing alongs are epic. The vocal harmonies are performed with joyful abandon whilst the instrumentation brings together an original collection of instruments that are passionately played and infectiously layered resulting in the kind of sound that can ...
There's something steady but explosive about London's The Big Pink. The band has compressed 50 years of loveless and lovelorn rock and roll into a sometimes unsettled but frequently tender circle. They're a truly modern pop group - seamlessly, the band melds folkish and warm melodies, the spiritual tranquility of soul and gospel, the rhythmic propulsion of rave, the white noise of punk, the glitchy textures of electronica, and the heavy drones of your favorite New York rock bands for a sound that's both distant and utterly familiar.But above and beyond it all, they sing about love: "Love for everything," they proclaim. They call what they do "Armageddon love songs", a neat way of describing the...
The xx are four precocious 19 year olds from south west london who provide the hushed minimal strokes of young marble giants and early cure but through the minds of a young act obsessed with the r&b turns of ciara and aaliyah, having gone so far as to cover the latter's 'hot like fire' as the b-side for their first single, 'crystalised' and having first been picked up after recording a sensational version of womak and womak's 'teardrops'. having signed to xl sub-label young turks earlier in the year the band begun to record with a host of the finest producers going, including brazilian giant diplo and up-and-coming hotshot kwes the four eventually settled with the option of recording at xl's in-house studio, with 'xx' e...
If you were to take the ingredients - fun, fearless, talented, prolific, savvy - throw them in a bowl and mix it all together, there's a very good chance you'd come up with power punk band The Summer Set, from Scottsdale, AZ.The Summer Set began with the Gomez brothers, bassist Stephen and guitarist John, who spent a great deal of their growing up time playing music together. Feeling that this was to become much more than a hobby, at the age of 14 they made the mature decision to put together a band. Turning to longtime gal pal Jess Bowen, who was playing drums in the school band, they began setting the roots for The Summer Set. As soon as they met vocalist Brian Dales and guitarist Josh Montgomery in 2007, they k...
Medeski Martin & Wood culminate their 2-year Radiolarians Series with a comprehensive box set of material entitled Radiolarians: The Evolutionary Set, which Indirecto Records will release on November 24, 2009. The box set will include: Radiolarians I, II and III complete with bonus tracks, a 10 track disc of remixed music, a previously unreleased 70-minute live album, a double vinyl LP set consisting of highlights from the three Radiolarians albums, plus a DVD feature film entitled Fly In A Bottle directed by Billy Martin. All of the material contained in the box was written and performed by MMW specifically for The Radiolarians Series. Additionally, fans who pre-order the boxset on MMW.net by Novem...
History has proved that every time a prevailing culture grows stagnant, a new artistic uprising takes place in order to wash away the past and look toward the future. For the past seven years Mukilteo, Washington's own The Fall Of Troy has been ignoring fleeting musical and fashion trends as its members have embarked on a quest to cultivate their own unique brand of progressive rock-and that process is culminating with the release of the trio's fourth album In the Unlikely Event (October 6, 2009/Equal Vision). Cinematic in scope and vision, In the Unlikely Event sees the band expanding its sound in every sense of the phrase: the heavy songs are bone-crushing, the melodic passages are instantly memorable and, most importa...
Over Stars And Gutters' Consider This Your Curse is the tale of two sides at war. The band's debut is a collection of passionate punk rock anthems that will leave you singing along in no time. Yet, the album breeds much more than your standard, mindless fist-pumping. Consider This Your Curse is sincere and passionate yet ripe with despair and confusion. Over Stars And Gutters wrap their jaded, lyrical stabs in heaps of emphatic melody. This is raw pop/punk for the seriously downtrodden yet there is an overwhelming sense of optimism that oozes from the band's memorable songs. Has hopelessness ever sounded this infectious and uplifting before?Consider This Your Curse is about the pain and confusion of growing up and...
Janus - is an ancient, two-faced Roman god of gateways and beginnings. Also the root word of January, Janus is a mythological figure that looks both forward and back and symbolizes change and transformation.To their fans' dismay, in mid-2008 JANUS disappeared from their hometown rock scene in Chicago...they secretly slaved away on a new project. This project was to be uncompromising in every aspect: from producing and engineering, to songwriting and branding, the band was going to do it own their own and better than anyone else in the business. One year later, RED RIGHT RETURN was born. JANUS' debut harkens back to the days w...
"I like to listen to music that makes me feel a certain way--either it reminds me of something important that happened or a certain time in my life," says Boys Like Girls frontman Martin Johnson. "If kids are feeling that way about our songs, I couldn't ask for anything more." The Boston-area band -- which also includes John Keefe (drums), Bryan Donahue (bass) and Paul DiGiovanni (lead guitar) -- is paying that feeling forward by focusing on making lasting connections with its fans. It's clear from the first note of their self-titled debut disc, which kicks off with the youthful enthusiasm of "The Great Escape" and closes with the "what's next?" sentiment of ball...
They love Andy Warhol, Darwin, Jimmy Page and Beethoven. Their MySpace friends include Phil Spector, Houdini and Napoleon. Their frontman loves shaking his hips on Steinway pianos. They love playing theremins, going crazy with synthesisers, turning their guitars up to 12 and singing exuberant songs about love, drugs, and girls. They are Raygun - the brand new British band who want to bring excitement, Pop, and magic back to Rock and Roll. More about their frontman? He's called Ray Gun. He's the man on "lead vox and sonic experimentation". Blue-eyed, slinky-limbed and razor-cheekboned, he looks and sounds like the velvet-voiced, finger-waggling progeny of a promiscuous session between Jagger, Bowie and Iggy pop....
