112 items found for your search. If no results were found please broaden your search.
(09/08/10 6:00am)
Since we last spoke, the newest Weezer album, Hurley hit the
Internet. Named after the ""Lost"" character whose face was kindly
magnified for the album's cover art, Hurley marks the eighth LP in
one of contemporary pop culture's most institutionalized catalogs.
So far as I know, no single band's work has evoked such a wide
range of reactions from the same audience. Each Weezer album has
such distinct features and values that their titles can and should
be used as adjectives to fit various degrees of merit. Consider the
following your guide to appropriate usage of Weezer album titles in
a colloquial setting:
(09/07/10 6:00am)
The Thermals were always too fun to be viewed as the political band
they saw themselves as. Their 2006 LP, The Body, The Blood, The
Machine, was perhaps the most seamless critique the Bush
Administration ever received, but The Thermals' keen Orwellian
satire spared them from the abrupt wrist-flicking afforded to other
groups with a political bent. The overwhelming charm that once
excused the Portland three-some, however, is now entirely absent.
Personal Life, their latest output on Kill Rock Stars,
loses the emphasis on the punching guitar hooks and in-your-face
sing-a-longs in favor of soft, melodious love songs. And it gets
tiresome.
(08/25/10 6:00am)
You know those times when ephemeral moments aren't? When a sliver
of time is so resonant that it stays with you your whole life?
They're the cultural touchstones you talk about at work picnics
because everybody from the same generation can instantly recall
precisely where they were, what they were doing and how that one
event directly or indirectly brought them to that very function.
Pearl Harbor, the Berlin Wall, September 11, John Stocco's
quarterback draw to beat Michigan in 2005—all of them the same.
(08/04/10 6:00am)
Nobody ever accused Meric Long of being too decisive. ""Sad, but
it's not; maybe just for a moment,"" he humbly coos on the ambient,
reserved introduction to ""Joe's Waltz,"" just one verse before
driving into the angular, violent whirlwind of action and reform
that closes the song. The vocalist and guitarist for the
acoustic-pop group the Dodos writes songs that waft loneliness and
desperation, all the while bursting with confidence and
liveliness—oftentimes within the same eight bars of music. The
Dodos fearlessly twisted and dragged each song on 2008's
Visiter to its most strenuous, uncomfortable limit. They
just couldn't be helped.
(07/28/10 6:00am)
Bethany Cosentino is dreamy. Whether she's looking for lost love
or hiding from it by way of marijuana, her head always seems to be
stuck in the clouds. Over the last year, Cosentino—alongside buddy
Bobb Bruno under the moniker Best Coast—has released a slew of EP's
and 7""s that capture the dreary-eyed blankness of a recluse in
love and forge a middle ground between pop culture's romanticism
and the real world's despair. The California trio's debut LP,
Crazy For You, stays the course, but in a deliberately
sunnier way that pays dividends in its directness.
(07/14/10 6:00am)
Talking on the phone, Angus Andrew sounds like an author. The
lanky singer for the experimental art-noise band Liars is
terrifically eloquent, but it's not just the way he talks—Andrew
thinks like an author, too. He's much more willing to discuss the
thematic constructs and narrative bones of his music than time
signatures or chord changes. He has never published a novel, but he
talks about Liars' albums as if they're his books—more vehicles for
ideas than collections of songs. And if their albums are books,
then this year's Sisterworld is his take on the
post-modern great American novel.
(06/29/10 6:00am)
Mathangi Arulpragasm—known to her friends as Maya—was going to
give birth in a bathtub. The 34-year-old mother-to-be was born in
Sri Lanka, you see, and wears the Third World badge proudly. She
rejects America's compromising diplomacy and capitalist-fueled
technology—even that used for health benefit. She not only wanted
to endure the same conditions forced upon the impoverished masses,
but she wanted to embrace the organic complexities that technology
denies us. And she seemed confrontational enough to do it,
preaching a fire-with-fire approach to problem solving throughout
her first two albums.
(05/19/10 6:00am)
(04/28/10 6:00am)
Five years ago she might have had a Monday morning to herself.
Maybe she could pick up some groceries, balance her checkbook or
set up a lunch trading gossip with a classmate. But nowadays, Ellen
Campesinos! can't even make a trip to the post office without her
phone ringing.
(04/25/10 6:00am)
A lot of words have popped up to describe the trending penchant
to flood ears with a sound so oversaturated that it drips beads of
sunshine. Chillwave, chill-house, glo-fi, no-fi and even hypnagogic
pop have all been pegged to describe bands that create a wall of
fuzz to keep an arm around almost childishly adventurous hooks. But
what makes Brooklyn-based Small Black's Small Black EP
such a milestone is how the band manages to escape the overtly
pretentious tags and formulate purified pop music that
compartmentalizes all of the genre's more off-putting
tendencies.
(03/10/10 6:00am)
""I'm destroying everything that wouldn't make me more
like Bruce Springsteen""
(02/18/10 6:00am)
What's the deal with Art Brut, anyway? Are they a rock 'n' roll
band that makes jokes or a joke band that plays rock 'n' roll? And
what's the deal with the French? When it comes to inconsequential
leisure goods (cheese, wine, soccer) they're some of the world's
best, but when it comes to things that actually matter (influencing
global politics, winning wars) they don't have the same success. So
why, then, would anyone aim to join a resistance against such
harmless friends?
(02/07/10 6:00am)
Through all the genre-saturation hullabaloo generated by the
Internet, there are two veins of sound most poised to identify
themselves as the namesake of the current decade-plus in music
history. Animal Collective's digitalized experimentation has the
most followers in both bands and fans, and its very literal
technology-bound soundscape makes it an easy candidate for the
title; but bands like TV on the Radio make a bold statement for a
different form of otherworldly inventiveness, one not tied to the
blips and bloops we associate with our own technological progress.
And it's in this second vein that Yeasayer find themselves on their
latest, Odd Blood.
(01/27/10 6:00am)
In the frantic waning moments of ""You! Me! Dancing!,"" Los
Campesinos! frontman Gareth Campesinos! hastily shouts, ""And we're
just like how Rousseau depicts man in the state of nature: We're
underdeveloped, we're ignorant, we're stupid but we're happy."" And
that, in a nutshell, is an appropriate thesis for LC! at their
onset. They re-invented twee pop, sprinkling teen angst on top of
their signature brand of ebullient sonic candy. But what also
reinforces the lyric's weight is that it foreshadowed the overt
misery, melodramatic grandeur and tinted worldview on their latest,
Romance is Boring.
(01/24/10 6:00am)
In the two years leading up to the release of
Transference—Spoon's seventh studio album—Spoon has been
faced with the lofty task of following up their own perfection.
Their previous release, 2007's formidable Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga,
was about as conclusive a punctuation mark as it gets, the
full-bodied conclusion to the skeletal sketches they'd slowly
perfected throughout the preceding 13 years. If there was any room
for improvement left in their airtight creases or minimalist
instrumentation, they didn't show it.
(01/19/10 6:00am)
After just 10 songs, Vampire Weekend became the face of indie
rock. Combining Paul Simon's Afro-pop and cardigan sweaters, the
four Columbia grads swept the nation with their smug grins
stretched ear-to-ear and pretentious dispositions emblazoned on
their polos. And now, almost exactly two years later, they return
with another rushed venture into half-hearted songwork that tests
the limits of what we as listeners demand from our posterboys.
(12/15/09 6:00am)
These days it seems you have to actually be saying
something in order to be heard. Talking heads laud romantic
comedies for their culturally insightful subtexts, and children's
cartoons earn merits for their life lessons and political
correctness. And in all honesty, there are probably 40 albums just
as good as Smith Westerns' eponymous debut hidden in high school
talent shows that actually say something, but what sets
Smith Westerns apart is the way their grimy aesthetics and mucky
presentation play off their unrelenting ebullience. Instead of
airing grievances against overbearing principals or suffocating
suburbs, Smith Westerns just take it as it comes, all the while
wearing ear-to-ear, shit-eating grins.
(12/15/09 6:00am)
There isn't much undiscovered land left on earth. While most
authorities have dubbed space the final frontier, there's a serious
divide—both geographically and personally—between people in living
rooms and gaudy NASA equipment light-years away. Although our
future relatives might own real estate on the moon, for our sake
we're likely confusing literary and scientific fodder for
legitimate expansion. And if you take only one lesson away from
indie rock's most ambitious debut, Cymbals Eat Guitars' Why
There Are Mountains, it's that. Although we're indefinitely
stuck on this increasingly crusty rock, we're wasting our resources
if we fail to revisit and re-evaluate the forest behind the
trees.
(12/11/09 6:00am)
In ""Hornets! Hornets!,"" Craig Finn claims, ""I guess the heavy
stuff ain't quite the heaviest by the time it gets out to suburban
Minneapolis."" Finn spent his formative years in Edina, Minn.,
witnessing first-hand how a bottleneck effect dilutes all mediums
of entertainment to relative monotony. Thousands of lakes and
hundreds of highways removed from the American bright lights and
big cities where kids get their kicks and boys and girls have such
sad times together, Finn posed the Replacements' and Hüsker Dü's
pent-up disenchantment as hyper-literate narratives to document a
wider scope of angst than their own inner rage.
(12/09/09 6:00am)
For the past two years, I've made adamant assertions that Spoon
is the Pavement of this decade. They're the two bands every indie
kid can agree on. The two are both immediately recognizable and
accessible. They cue emotion more like film directors than actual
musicians, relying on a vision of inter-studio relationships more
than musical talent.