Janeska sings in a style that has manifested itself through much of dance culture, outwardly sounding like Jennifer Lopez and Gwen Stefani. To couch tracks like “On Your Knees” as anything besides feel-good music would be mis-contextualize Janeska. While “Moonlight” uses a much slower tempo for its backing beat, the same pop-pandering style is put forth by Janeska. Here might be a hint of techno present in the track, but…
Individuals who have any access to outside musical sources (whether they be popular radio or music video stations) have at least some idea who Jane’s Addiction were. Practically any discussion about the nineties will have a section about the band (or their biggest hit, “Been Caught Stealing”) due to the effect that the band has had on individuals and bands both contemporary and current. The fact that there had not…
Transcendent of any musical genre, Jane’s sophomore release begins with “Never Thought It Was Love”, a country meets Sheryl Crow-type of romp, which moves into the much more electronically-infused “Place To Find You”. Instead of overdoing it with the synthesizer lines in the aforementioned track, Jane is able to chart eirself as a more sedate alternative to Madonna. “Place To Find You” is a more sedate, nineties-themed dance track. The…
Coming off as a less Christian Crystal Lewis, Jane performs a very innocuous type of pop music that owes more to The Carpenters and Shania Twain than Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera. While Jane does play acoustic guitar, another ten people join into the mix, but each individual (at least those who play instruments) sounds more like a program function of Cakewalk than an actual human being. Take the five-minute…
To be honest, it took me a few minutes to truly get into the type of music that Jaks played. By the time that the track “Damn Bloodsucker” started up, I knew that I would be a fan of their dance-noise style. The ever-present bass lines (which provide a groove all their own) and the Primus-like arrangement of “Dumbwaiter” show a band that liked to experiment with the boundaries of…
The Jai-Alai Savant’s “Thunderstatement” gives listeners the same general feeling as if they happened on a seventies rock band’s album that has been lost for the last thirty or so years. During tracks like “Scarlett Johansson, Why Don’t You Love Me”, the band’s music really comes forth as if it was born directly from the arena rock era. The band moves up a few years to the Police-sounding title-track. Where…
I thought when “Banned In America” started that Jade would be creating something that was an Avril clone. Don’t get me wrong, the vocal style of Jade is still something that is pop-based, but the backing instrumentation is something that is much more heavy and rock-based. This puts Jade in the position of being another Amy lee. The vocal style gives me more of a Celine Dion feel, so the…
“I Am The Light” starts off in a much different vein than the following tracks would indicate. This is because “Jaxbac” is a purely vocal track that rivals (but does not emulate) throat-singing, while both “Blood Doesn’t Lie” and “Nowhere To Land” approach the industrial, early-nineties goth sound without abandon. The music on tracks like “I Am The Light” seem to be drawn from the Middle Eastern tradition of music,…
Aside from the wonderful new-plastic smell of the CD booklet, Ivy’s Butterfly strikes me at the beginning of their CD for another reason : the rich layering of vocals and the guitars unafraid to be both explorative and to rock out. Ivy’s Butterfly also provides me with a slight problem, as with Go Rimbaud, the sheer work they do on each track renders it virtually impossible to assign a generally-acceptable…
The dreamy pop of Ivy is cultured, having been refined for the last decade over four albums. The music that starts off the disc, especially “Nothing But The Sky”, does not cut as deep as it could. Everything seems to traverse the same narrow swath during the 5:12 of the track, ultimately leaving a certain hollowness and lack of depth that plagues the band throughout the disc. “Thinking About You”…
Okay, so I went into It Dies Today’s “Sirens” pretty negatively. The first verse of the first song had me making my “Eww, all yelling metal crap.” But, you guys won me back over. The growls and yelling were used tastefully, backed by vocals I actually quite enjoy. And the yelling is pretty unique; I can still make out all the lyrics. “A Port in Any Storm” actually had some…
Ism – Monkey Underneath I had started writing my review of “Monkey Underneath”, but after writing about half of it I realized that the music that was playing from my speakers was in reality not Ism but Him or Avenged Sevenfold, coming out of one of my friends’ Myspace. Oh well, Ism sounds quite different from either band, so I can’t salvage much besides “and” and “the”. The style of…
I loved The Unicorns a great deal when I heard their “Who Will Cut Our Hair When We’re Gone”, and to hear that some of the members of that band are in the Islands, I began to get excited about “Return to the Sea”. The album breaks away from the traditional pop act sound by incorporating a number of vocalists as the focal point of the band. In this sense,…
It is true that Oceanic fits well with the sound that Isis puts on this disc. For “Weight”, done by Fennesz gives listeners a sense of being by a sea. This sea sound, created by white noise, is one of the better emulations of nature. This compilation of “reinterpretations” is interesting to say the least. While Fennesz has a very solemn and sedate sound dominating their track, Ayal Naor creates…
Scheduled for release on June 8th, 2010 by Seeland Records, the label owned by legendary culture-jammers, Negativland, GiTAr’s “STUFFED” has the potential to make you more than you are without it. GiTAr members Ellipse Elkshow and I Cut People were raised in Evansville, Indiana, home to major polluters, factories, cancer statistics, pharmaceutical manufacturing and a test town for new products cooked up by various fast food giants. In that cold…
I’m not sure exactly if having two non-song tracks to start out your album is necessarily something a rapper attempting to reach that next level of fame really should be doing. When J. Isaac starts the song section of eir disc with “Baby Ez Up”, a lot of this doubt disappears. “Baby Ez Up” starts out in a Sisqo vein, but the backing beat seems to be a little anemic…
There are albums that are re-released for a number of reasons seemingly every day. Expanded editions, discs with new tracks on them, but very rarely is it that a deleted, long out of print album will see the ligh of day again. It probably will not happen in regards to Warren Zevon’s Terminus City or Neil Young’s Trans, but to see that there are individuals that will take it upon…
The style of music that Irving plays is something that has not been heard quite as much since the end of the eighties. The very dusky, retro sound of Irving is done with a quality that will make individuals find something to love about the band, even if the individual’s tastes are far removed from the band’s style. For example, a song like “Situation” is something that is heavily based…
This is hardcore that should be called such, instead of jock-metal. This mixes thrash, punk, and Slayer-like metal to create something that is hard enough to bang one’s head to but not dark enough that a killer mosh pit couldn’t be started. The band, which has members of Sick of It All, Nausea, and Killing Time in it, really shows a maturity that goes well beyond the amount of time…
Fresh off their 2007 effort, “Read The Signs”, DownTown Mystic have just cut their latest album, “Standing Still”. “Standing Still” represents an evolutionary step forward for the act, while still maintaining cohesion amongst the disc’s thirteen cuts. “Backdoor” starts out with a bit of blues-tinged rock that allows Robert’s vocals to approach the timbre and quality of a Warren Zevon or Jimmy Buffett. Despite having a sound that would easily…