“Knuckles and Nipples”, the band (and the disc’s) theme, comes through with a fury that initially begins with a very growling, Doom-like vocal quality to MC Homeless’ vocals. In “Your Taste In Music Sucks”, the band does really not allow itself enough to really get out and construct an distinct sound for their track. The song is really just a car crash before the occupants could get up to full…
Jess Klein starts “Strawberry Lover” with one of the most bold steps forward on a disc I’ve ever heard, with “Darkroom” mixing together punk directness, country, musicals (think “Little Shop of Horrors”) and gospel in well less than three minutes. “Shonalee” has to be the farthest that Jess can go away from “Darkroom”, but the nuanced guitar lines on the track ensures the same level of quality being reached by…
Coming out of the gate with some impressive two part harmonies, especially during “Through the Width of a Straw”, The Kite-Eating Tree makes their own disc into an interesting journey. Mixing up a great deal of distortion with saccharine-sweet vocals, “Method: Fail, Repeat…” is an amalgam of two major stylistic genres: what is being called emo-rock (in the vein of Taking Back Sunday and Story of the Year) and an…
The sly sound of “Sillhouettes” mixes well with the light instrumentation that individuals are confronted with at the onset of this self-titled EP. In a sense, Kissing Cousins sound like “Horses”-era Patti Smith, mixed with a good serving of the Velvet Underground (when they still had Nico). It is during “Phone Call” that Kissing Cousins really get into something that more closely relates itself to punk music. However, this is…
Kissing Cousins start off their second EP with a very Spartan arrangement for their “Deadline”. The confident guitars of the track are reminiscent of a Johynny Cash track seen through the eyes of early nineties “ironic” country like Christopher Isaak. The second track is marked with a very industrial backdrop on their “Live Without You”. The vocals do not seem to mesh well with the very cold and mechanical sound…
Very few artists stick to their guns for twenty years. Keith Petty, mastermind behind Kirlian Aura, has done just that. Starting the act in 1988, a demo were released in 1991 and 2007 sees the release of this, arguably Kirlian Aura’s “magnum opus”. Twenty-three tracks adorn this album, which immediately rings warning bells in my head. As anyone that has experience movie soundtracks knows, it is tremendously hard to craft…
“Here’s The Plan” sounds as if Billy Joel dropped eir piano and decided to pick up a guitar. That is to say that Michael Weston King plays a classic brand of pop music that will have individuals singing along no matter their age or musical tastes. The opening track to “A New Kind of Loneliness” may be over five minutes but King is enough of a storyteller to keep individuals…
King Elementary start off “Kudzu” with “For the Birds”, a track that shows a tremendous amount of the band’s influence coming from the psychedelic sixties (the guitar solo present on the track sound a hell of a lot like “Break On Through”). Other tracks, like “Thief of Hearts” maintains this earlier influence but really allows Morgan’s vocals to look at bands like the Von Bondies and The Strokes for form…
It is very rare to get a chance to hear a musician that has been working on eir skills for 65 years; the resulting music on “Saw Mill Man” has a patience inherent in it that really shows this maturity. I would say that ey sounds like Johnny Cash, even though King is six years eir senior. There is little excess to this disc; every track essentially consists of King’s…
It is very rare to see that a band has been together for such a long time. Barring the years that they were trying to get back together, Kill Van Kull has been a band since 1983. It is thus not surprising to hear such talent and ability come from each member of the band. The one thing that individuals might have worried about, the freshness of the style of…
Kill The Hippies are the first band to ever do a reverse chronology for their complete retrospective. Most the time, individuals have to suffer through the caterwaulings of a very green band that really had no clue before getting to the gold. On both of these discs, the newest tracks open up the disc before going back into the annals of the band’s history (Kill The Hippies started in 1993).…
6/30 @ The Triple – Richmond, VA – w/ MUTILATION RITES, PLAGUE THE SUFFERING 7/1 @ Slims – Raleigh, NC 7/2 @ 585 Wells St. – Atlanta, GA 7/3 @ The Junkyard – Gainesville, FL – w/ HOT GRAVES, MUTILATION RITES 7/4 @ The Brass Mug – Tampa, FL – w/ HOT GRAVES, FATAL 7/5 @ The Joint Collective – Sarasota, FL 7/6 @ Warehouse 8B – Jacksonville, FL –…
It is honestly hard to really assign Killjoy Confetti with a specific style of music. Comparison between them and other diverse and experimental bands may do better justice; the band during tracks like “Excuse The Blood” really mix Nico-era Velvet Underground with Patti, using progressive, Queens of the Stone Age-type of rock to fuel the track. The challenge that Killjoy Confetti really give their listeners during the opening two salvos…
Killing the Dream starts out their “In Place, Apart” with a fury that has not been heard since Strike Anywhere’s “Exit English” or “Siren Song of the Counter-Culture-era” Rise Against. In fact, lead vocalist Elijah has more than a passing similarity to Rise Against’s vocalist Tim, a comparison that only gets stronger as the disc continues to spin. What does provide a major problem at the onset of “In Place,…
The distortion that is present on the first tracks of “Songs For The Christmas Party”, specifically “A Memo for All Rock Journalists”, fights with the vocals to establish the dominant force during the disc. The distortion eventually wins out, but individuals can hear what is being played pretty clearly. The style of music that Killer Squirrel plays is something that is straight forward and punk as fuck at some point;…
The brand of hardcore that The Killer play is influenced by both earlier hardcore and metal acts. Thus, tracks like “Where Will You Go?” are tied to the eighties metal of acts like Megadeth, with repetitious guitars driving a rhythm far into listeners’ heads. The great thing about The Killer is that the music on “Better Judged By Twelve” was recorded over two years ago, and still sounds as fresh…
“Matryoshka” is the first track listeners will encounter during Elevator Art’s self-titled release, and it is integral for beginning to understand exactly what it is that the band will set out to do here. The frenetic energy that the band brings to the table will remind listeners of Interpol and The Anniversary just as a more current and vibrant sound comes to bear.
It is really hard for an act to successfully create a cover song. I understand that there are a tremendous amount of covers out there currently, but one has to admit that the vast majority of them are pretty garish. If they sound decent, chances are good that they do nothing to make the track their own, while even if they do try to traipse down another track, their effort…
“Indians and Clowns”, the self-titled track to Miriams Well’s newest album, is a hard-hitting bit of country rock that has just as much in common with Shania Twain and the Dixie Chicks as it does with Bon Jovi and Every Mother’s Nightmare. Building a sound that transcends beyond both of these styles is hard, but is something that the band’s members does with each subsequent track. “More Than I” slows…
It sometimes can be difficult to understand what a band is all about when they provide a reviewer with an EP. However, I feel that Lithium Seven is an act that are able to squeeze in a proper introduction on the three tracks that comprise “Something Else Is Waiting”. The first song here is “Get To Montana”, a bit of pop-rock that rides the waves created by acts like John…