Stomacher is a band that knows what it is doing. Everything, from the art to the songwriting to the recording techniques, is highly stylized. No part of this album “just happened.” I don’t know what the people in this band are like, but I’m willing to bet they’re a lot like the guys in...
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In terms of what you should play to get famous as a band, The Felix Culpa wins. In terms of what you should do to get famous as a band, they have failed miserably. They released their first album Commitment in 2004. It was generally heralded as awesome by people like Alt Press, PunkNews.org...
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Upon reading the press release that accompanied The Black & The Blue, the debut full-length from San Jose, CA, band For.The.Win., I saw that they called themselves “Bay Area Posi-Core.” I’m going to be perfectly honest with you folks, I don’t have the slightest idea what “Posi-Core” means. Nevertheless, I trudged forth and listened...
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A snarling, devil-may-care attitude used to be one of the defining characteristics of rock’n'roll. When that attitude folded into post-grunge’s misogynistic machismo (in approximately 1995, when grunge’s rebellion had completely metamorphosed into radio-readiness), indie-rock picked up the emotive banner, effectively abandoning the gritty bad boy image for an excess-is-rock’n'roll mentality or emotions-are-rock’n'roll ideology. All...
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Post-hardcore, as I define it, is hardcore music with emotions and melodies running through it. These emotions present themselves through singing, yelling and spoken word (as opposed to the traditional screaming, growling and roaring of pure hardcore). The melodies come through in the guitars or in the vocals. Inside that definition, Hands is a...
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Peasant’s single for “The End” is a compelling little teaser. The two unique folk tunes enclosed here (as well as an acoustic version of said single) are intimate yet not overly introspective. It feels like I’m getting a personal performance from Peasant, but it doesn’t feel like he’s moping about, regretting his life (as...
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Michel Ackermann has two things in his piano pop that set him aside: he’s German, and he comes from a classical piano background. The fact that he’s from Berlin comes out in his unique vocal intonations; the fact that he’s from a classical piano background has a grounding effect on his tunes.
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“Empire! Empire! (I Was a Lonely Estate)” has got to be one of the all-time strangest band names I have ever encountered. First of all, it’s seven words long. Seven. Secondly, not only does it incorporate punctuation, the name includes different kinds – both exclamation points and parenthesis. It makes me wonder what their...
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Blitzen Trapper at Camden Barfly, London—9/14/09 “Welcome to the wild forests of Oregon,” singer/guitarist Marty Marquis advised the multinational crowd at the Camden Barfly in Camden Town, London Monday night. The pre-show air of international banter revealed an odd mix of Germans, Canadians, local Brits, and Scottish, though by the end of the evening...
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The Woods are an experimental folk band, heavy on experimental. There are five songs here that run for twelve minutes on The EP Logue, and not one of them is easily categorized. If the “blink and you miss it” nature of Half-Handed Cloud’s fragmented pop songs collided with the mellower moments of Good News...
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