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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
“Merge is not just a band, it’s a business” is probably the biggest warning sign that I could ever be given before putting this disc in my stereo. I’ve proven time after time that individuals that feel that their act is a business usually spend too much of their time trying to work that angle and allowing their music to suffer as a result. This is what happened with Rawdialect,…
I’ve never heard of either of the bands on this split CD, which is always a good thing. Splits usually have some sort of gimmick to them, either that both bands cover each other’s songs or that there is some third band they are paying tribute to. However, this CD has nothing more than four tracks done by each act, a way to get some sort of idea about the…
With their split with Enemy Rose, Mercy Killers showed that they had something to them that individuals should find attractive. Given the entire space of a CD, would Mercy Killers be able to come up with enough material to stay on the top of a hill? Of course, when the band starts off “Bloodlove”, there are hints of the punkabilly style. “Hollow” is its own track, and while it does…
Mephi – Music for Dead Blondes This is probably the last Israeli band I will have to review unless Useless ID sends me a disc in the near future. This disc has a really lo-fi sound to it,m and I am at a loss of words when I try to classify it as any specific genre. Rather, I would have to say that MEPHI really mixes indie, They Might Be…
The collection of tracks on this album really shows the hard-edge punk sound that Mental Pain has been trying to craft in the Southeastern corner of Ohio for the last five years. One cannot do any better but start off this album with “Together We Stand”, a track that puts Mental Pain alongside The Unseen and The Casualties for pure streetpunk. “Raw and Ruthless” may not have the pure catchiness…