Settlefish’s newest album “ The Plural of the Choir” comes to a slow start and finally reaches the heights with “The Barnacle Beach”. The track benefits mostly from an interesting and innovative way of arrangement that staggers a myriad of vocals to draw all listeners along for the ride. Continuing the At The Drive-In esque vocals that marked their previous Deep Elm release, “Dance A While, Upset”, Settlefish ride the…
Mizar starts off “The King of the Stars” with a synthesizer track that mixes together Nintendo midis with traditional “gothic” and dance beats. However salvageable the beat was (for it was not the cutting edge of innovation), Mizar’s own vocals, overbearing and poorly recorded really cast the track further down in ignominy. “Out of Control” is an early track that shows a minor amount of movement to the positive end…
New wave music with the chirpiness of synthesizers in the vein of Wendy Carlos, and a voice that is almost painful to listen to. While someone like Atom and His Package can use a kitschy sound and synthesizer to make light-hearted music, Mizar loses any impressiveness from the intricately planned out synth lines with vocals dumped on each track seemingly with a $2 microphone. The lo-fi synth sound has been…
The style of music that The Mitchells play is indie rock that has more than its fair share of eighties influences (acts like Joy Division and Depeche Mode). Thus, a song like “Still Might Happen” is catchy, vocal-heavy, and full of angular guitar riffs that give form and structure to the track. The band starts strongly, but the opening song seems to have about thirty seconds extra music present that…
When I first started listening to Miss Violetta Beauregarde, I started thinking that eir website – Violettasucks.com – was something that showed that Beauregarde knew what ey was talking about. The style is something that is close to the work of artists like Peaches, but with a hint of the digital hardcore that acts like Lolita Storm created for their audiences a few years back. During “How To Use A…
One has to wonder about what Misstress Barbara was thinking by putting Sebo K’s “Too Hot” in the opening spot on this disc; the track has an interesting beat for 20 seconds and then repeats it for the next five minutes. This trend is ameliorated during Lorna’s “Feel Good”, but does not completely disappear. I understand the need for club albums, but even with repetitive dance rhythms there is still…
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…
“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…
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…
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…
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…
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…