Music

With Setting The Paces, BOAT has written an album that slots into my demographic with an almost startling precision. Did you spend your mid-to-late-twenties in the Pacific Northwest? How about a wannabe Northwest town like Madison, Wisconsin? If you answered “yes” to either of these questions, then Setting the Paces will surprise you with its detailed description of the life you are living — literally living — right now. Getting the brass tacks out of the way: if this album hits the big time, it will be on the legs of radio-friendly single “Lately.” Opening and closing with a Modest Mouse-y guitar riff and post-disco beat, this track leans to the danceable side of head-nodding. The strength of the composition [...]

The past few years of mellow European albums show the poorly-executed experimental turn that melodic pop has taken. Replacing the simple, guitar-accompanied vocals of bands like Death Cab for Cutie are the synthesized sounds of Phoenix and nameless others who enjoy robotic voices too much. Not only that, but lyrics now seem to take a backseat to artificial, deliberately inconsistent rhythms that appear like an attempt at a cheap, DJ-inspired indie evolution. Absent after a five-year hiatus, Kings of Convenience, composed of Erlend Øye and Eirik Glambek Bøe from Bergen, Norway, return with their signature style with Declaration Of Dependence. “Riot On An Empty Street” takes back the intellectual mellowness they started with, and “Quiet Is The New Loud” puts [...]

The Satanic Satanist is a heart-warming pop effort that also relies on one’s ability to connect with the softness and imagery of Gourley’s lyrics. Interspersed also are more “nerdy” things — covert as they may be — that are inspired by otherworldly stories Gourley was told or things he saw with his own eyes growing up in Alaska.

More than a year ago, I was introduced to the raucous electro-indie-punk stylings of Duchess Says. They represented, to me, the perfect hybrid of mainstream dance rock and teen center electro, and in my book, they had the perfect recipe for success. Their song “Black Flag” seemed an automatic indie hipster staple, provided the hipsters ever got wind of it. And while I did in fact hear “Black Flag” a few times in hipster-certified joints, Duchess Says’ music seemed largely lost on the general public, and as a result, they seemed never — except for one time when I was out of town — to tour the west coast. So, at CMJ this year, I made a special point to [...]

A good way to see if a label’s music matches your tastes is to check out a sampler they’ve released, and 23 Seconds’ A Shortcut Past The Fear compilation album is certainly worth a click. Available from the label website as a free high quality 320 kbit/s mp3 in a 76mb .zip file download, the album was released in June this year and is a delight which offers a variety of music from Indonesia, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The album kicks off with a wonderfully sparse piano and vocal track from Jesper Norda who, while being reminiscent of Leonard Cohen, in that they come from the same school of poetic songwriting, does not suffer from [...]

Into It. Over It’s mastermind, Evan Thomas Weiss, is a member of Damiera and played in Up Up Down Down, a band that I consider one of the most underrated power-pop bands of all time. With that in mind, I expected some good songs, but was a bit skeptical for his solo effort, 52 Weeks, under the Into It. Over It. moniker. For one thing, the concept was that Weiss wrote and recorded 52 tracks –- one track a week for a year — alongside occasional collaborators from well-received bands like Jena Berlin, The Early November and Damiera. It’s not easy to write an album’s worth of songs, let alone GREAT songs, so it was interesting to see where this [...]

If Aim And Ignite, the debut album by fun., was a character in a play, it would be the type of person that exaggerates every emotion. When that person is sad, he/she is really down in the dumps. When the person is happy, he/she skips around and does a little dance. While dramatic people can often become obnoxious, exaggeration in art can be a great thing. Considering that fun. consists of Nate Ruess of The Format, Jack Antonoff of Steel Train and Andrew Dost of Anathallo, it is no surprise that the ten songs on the album are a bit larger than life. The songs are not big in the sense that they are loud or should be considered arena [...]

The instrumental, post-rock landscape is a bit crowded as of late. But in just three albums, the Chicago/Seattle trio Russian Circles have cemented themselves at the top, and this fact is readily apparent in their fantastic new album, Geneva. Russian Circles have always bounced between the moments that recall sunshine and the moments that recall audio armageddon. The issue up to this point has been how to balance the serene with the surrounding apocalyptic, sludgy tones that tear it all down. Geneva sludges across with “Fathom,” and right from the get-go, the now cemented new bassist Brian Cook makes his presence known. Cook is no stranger to the mastery of the low-end, as his previous work with Botch and These [...]

Holy crap, this is lo-fi! The self-titled release from the trio Okie Dokie sounds like it was recorded in a human-sized garbage disposal unit. Somehow, that description is doing the sound quality a favor as well. This EP is a short-as-hell blast of punk rock as dirty as it was back in the ’80s. The kind of music only fit to be played in a bar where the smoke peels the paint off the wall and the same ten individuals have permanently engraved their names onto their respective bar stools. So does that make it any good? Not sure. This new lo-fi binge going around has lended its fair share of individuals who think that since they can play three [...]

Sure, Canada gave the world Broken Social Scene, but analogously speaking, Canada may be to the crowd of Crystal Castles fans what the last decade of Sub Pop releases is to modern hipsterdom. Although both seemed to harbor the potential to redefine this generation of the disillusioned hoping to reclaim a shred of cultural dignity, they only ended up pigeonholing speculative alternative rock into a gentrified, clichéd niche that forced everyone to run away in shame of being labeled a fan of the Garden State soundtrack. Concepts, the first full-length album by Toronto-based band Little Girls, aptly follows the same trend. With distinct minor guitar rifts paired with scratchy and ethereal vocals, the duo brings to mind British punk staple [...]