I saw Waxahatchee perform in a bowling alley this past fall. Used to the punk shows and crowd-sweat that had been there before, the small-ish turnout made the place look way more cavernous than I remembered. I’d forgotten that the small tour she was on was going to provide more low-key affairs, more solo-act than…
New Jersey-based quartet The Blithedale Romance, all furious guitars and shredded vocal cords, want you to know they’re trying. The young band took a mysterious, cultish online presence and rebranded their sound “new noise” leading up to the release of this, their second EP. Despite the half-makeover, the band comes out sounding more like themselves…
Punk rock, at its finest, both agitates and puts a smile on your face. Danish band Iceage did that on their previous two albums, New Brigade and You’re Nothing. Both were obliterating affairs dealing with both physical and philosophical anxieties in short, aggressive, and noisy spurts, like a Black Flag for the 21st century. This,…
Debut albums are tricky things to assess. An artist’s first full-length is not a reliable litmus test for how their career will pan out, or in some cases, their artistic validity. But it’s the unique blend of hype and mystery that always makes debuts exciting to listen to. That lack of history combined with the…
“Everything has chains.” That’s hard-learned wisdom from Brian Fallon, The Gaslight Anthem’s frontman, on “Selected Poems”, a latter-half album cut from the Jersey quartet’s latest album Get Hurt. It’s been a particularly hard year for Fallon, as he divorced from his wife of ten years. But he’s also had to deal with the aftermath of…
Radiator Hospital makes the kinds of records that your teenaged heart wishes it could have. Principle member Sam Cook-Parrott has meshed punk energy with pop songwriting since 2010 and has steadily stacked his discography with straight-up gems crafted with a great sense of earnestness, and yet all the modesty of a high school secret admirer.…
If you were born in the early 90’s, you might have discovered a few years back a vague but fond recollection of R&B radio hits of that decade. You’ll recognize the names: Whitney Houston, Janet Jackson, Jodeci and their spin-off K-Ci & JoJo, Boyz II Men… Keith Sweat. This rekindled affection may have stemmed, in…
