Category: Music Reviews

Posted on: September 30, 2010 Posted by: Sargeant Comments: 0

Miss Autopsy – Sweet (CD)

Miss Autopsy is not a goth band. They are a rock band that seems to pull sections from acts of the last fifteen years, so that hints of Alice in Chains, Tool, Nirvana and more all come through during tracks like “Good Is Not Good Enough”. The production of “Sweet” is solid all the way through, with songs conceivably being of a level that would allow play on a radio…

Posted on: September 30, 2010 Posted by: Sargeant Comments: 0

Miranda Sound – Western Reserve (CD)

“Jackson Milton” is a track that blends together a number of styles to show individuals that Miranda Sound has everything under control. The band eventually settles down into an emo style, but there are hints fo rock and punk just as there are numerous ties to the emo genre. Miranda Sound has a different approach to emo music than most other acts in the genre currently. For example, the previously…

Posted on: September 29, 2010 Posted by: Sargeant Comments: 0

Minutes Too Far – Let It Roll (CD)

Minutes Too Far’s “Let it Roll” captures I think the essential of what scenesters crave these days. Each song has radio quality, poppy with vocals that don’t really travel from the standard and onto new and adventurous. The vocalist never really sounds like the same guy from track to track, but his many personas are all safe. I feel as though at times that the beat carried through from song…

Posted on: September 29, 2010 Posted by: Sargeant Comments: 0

Minutes to Burn – Self/Titled (CD)

Mixing together the guitars of Rage Against the Machine and Sparta to make a laid-back form of punk music, Austin’s Minutes To Burn burst out onto the scene early this year. Starting off this disc with “Poison Everything”, Minutes To Burn brood every while building an energy with the powerful drum strikes by Jeremy. Continuing their deeply emotional sound with “Static”, the band further establishes themselves as a professional, solid…

Posted on: September 29, 2010 Posted by: Sargeant Comments: 0

The Minor Leagues – The Pestilence is Coming (CD)

The amount of individuals that contributed in some meaningful music way to “The Pestilence is Coming” is enough in number to make a small town. Forty individuals throw in with “additional performances”, and their work can easily be heard during the entirety of “The Pestilence is Coming”. The Minor Leagues play an interesting brand of indie rock that does not really have any temporal link. There are hints during the…

Posted on: September 28, 2010 Posted by: Sargeant Comments: 0

Minmae – 835 (CD)

The low key sound of Minmae during their “Pay More” will challenge listeners, as the eight and a half minutes that the track runs is nothing to scoff at. What simply sounds like a down tempo rock sound goes into noisy cacophony at points, keeping individuals attracted to the track. The random placement of clips from what sounds to be forties and fifties recordings give this another layer of depth,…

Posted on: September 28, 2010 Posted by: Sargeant Comments: 0

Milton and the Devils Party – What is All This Sweet Work Worth? (CD)

Milton and the Devils Party play a brand of alternative rock that is reminiscent of Elvis Costello and all the perfect car-driving tunes of the earliest days of the nineties. The recording on “What Is All This Sweet Work Worth?” is not the lush-ness expected from bands in this current day and age, but rather the quiet and septic mix of bands like Harvey Danger and The Pixies. The fury…

Posted on: September 28, 2010 Posted by: Sargeant Comments: 0

Jeff Mills – Blue Potential (CD)

I hear that Jeff Mills is a DJ. “Blue Potential” shows that this may just nt be the only tag he is worth of. This album features the Montpellier Philharmonic Orchestra (what, was the New York Philharmonic out for the day), and showcases Mills’ skills as an arranger. This means that songs like the opening have a decidedly film score-like sound for individuals, something that never quite leaves during the…

Posted on: September 27, 2010 Posted by: Sargeant Comments: 0

Blake Miller – Together With Cats (CD)

Just because you can make a track sound like it is old does not mean it has to sound like crap. Sure, I like the style of music that Blake Miller is trying to do during the opening to “Together With Cats”, but there is absolutely NO reason to have the vocals present on the track bury the needles. This creates a form of dissonance that will irritate and annoy…

Posted on: September 27, 2010 Posted by: Sargeant Comments: 0

Midnight Movies – Patient Eye / Golden Hair (CD)

For all intents and purposes, this is a single. There is an edited and an LP version of the same song coupled with a B-side. Thus, individuals do not have that much time to get to know who Midnight Movies are and what they intend to do in the music scene. The trance like vocals that start out ‘Patient Eye” hearken back to an earlier gothic style (mix Siouxsie and…

Posted on: September 27, 2010 Posted by: Sargeant Comments: 0

Midnight Movies – Lion The Girl (CD)

Individuals may have heard of Midnight Movies from the single they cut before the album was out, “Patient Eye”. Essentially, Midnight Movies attempted to take the world by storm with this track, which mixed a psychedelic style with a mid-nineties alternative style. Since there were so few tracks on their last EP, “Lion the Girl” is the first real chance most people will have listening to Midnight Movies. “Souvenirs” is…

Posted on: September 26, 2010 Posted by: Sargeant Comments: 0

Drayton Michaels – Low Stress in the Deep End (CD)

This band of dreamy-pop is of a style that really hasn’t been approached much since Sean Lennon started out back in the late nineties. Michaels’ music is not stale or rote in the least, and “Anyways” has the same laid-back beels that Christian superstar Bryan Duncan has had throughout his career. However, “Low Stress in the Deep End” can seem middling at times; the same fault that has reared its…

Posted on: September 26, 2010 Posted by: Sargeant Comments: 0

Mi and L’Au – S/T (CD)

The dreamy pop of “They Marry” shows Mi and L’Au as masters of atmosphere. While the track sounds outwardly positive, the flute and other incident instruments present on the track gives the song a darker feeling. The meandering flow of “Philosopher” uses repletion to drive home a simplistic, yet overall catchy melody to Mi and L’Au’s listener base. This repetition would be a key problem for practically any other act…

Posted on: September 26, 2010 Posted by: John B. Moore Comments: 0

American Hi-Fi – Fight the Frequency (Hi-Fi Killers/The Ascot Club) (CD)

Four records into it and American Hi-Fi are still living blissfully in the 90’s. It makes sense, given that front man Stacy Jones played drums for Letters to Cleo and Veruca Salt, two successful 90’s alt rock bands. On Fight the Frequency, the band’s first album in five years, American Hi-Fi plays competent alt rock with plenty of sing-along choruses, crunchy distorted guitars and tight drumming. What’s lacking is simply…

Posted on: September 25, 2010 Posted by: Sargeant Comments: 0

Mezzanine Owls – Slingshot Echoes (CD)

The opening strains of “Moving Around” has a very tenuous set of vocals and a much more insistent set of drums. This allows for two distinct strains of style to be present during the early part of “Slingshot Echoes”, and gives the band an ability to blend styles from the eighties , nineties, and the present. The band gets added style points by allowing the bassist to have a very…

Posted on: September 25, 2010 Posted by: Sargeant Comments: 0

Mew – And The Glass Handed Kites (CD)

The instrumentation that is present during the entirety of Mew’s “And The Glass Handed Kites” is leagues above anything else on the pop radar. There are so many things happening during a Mew track that listeners can play the track on repeat and just pick apart different facets of the dense arrangements that await them. The music that is played is not going to be the next #1 hit on…

Posted on: September 25, 2010 Posted by: Sargeant Comments: 0

Metric – Live It Out (CD)

The buzz behind Metric is huge, to say the least. The angular sound of tracks like “Glass Ceiling” really draws listeners back to the days of The Breeders (not the washed up version of the band that just released the album, but when they released “Cannonball), while tying itself to the current musical trend of herky-jerky dance-ready rock pioneered by bands like Franz Ferdinand. While the next track “Handshakes” begins…

Posted on: September 24, 2010 Posted by: Sargeant Comments: 0

Mess Up The Mess – You Remind Me Of Summer Vacation (CD)

Mess Up The Mess uses the same font on their album as TBS does during a number of their bumpers. I don’t know why I said that, but it seems to be as random as the band’s output on “You Remind Me Of Summer Vacation”. The first track on this disc is “Lawn Chair Meet Balloon”, and the track seems to blend together classic punk (Ramones), surf music, and hints…

Posted on: September 24, 2010 Posted by: Sargeant Comments: 0

Merl Saunders & Jerry Garcia – Well-Matched (CD)

I have to be honest; I had never heard of Merl Saunders before I put on this disc, and the only Greatful Dead song that I was familiar with was “Touch of Grey”. To say that I was a novice when I put this disc on is to give me credit that I do not deserve. On the other hand, I feel as if I am one of the better…

Posted on: September 24, 2010 Posted by: Sargeant Comments: 0

Merit – S/T (CD)

The strong female vocals that start off “Penny jar” are not immediately reconcilable with any other artist on the market. There are hints of Plumb in Merit’s style of music, but nothing that screams “influence”. This bodes well for Merit, as the style of music that they play is a blend of rock and indie, allowing for the band to enjoy success wherever they end up. The guitar progression of…