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Fears by Pretty Mouth Toronto experimental rock outfit Pretty Mouth certainly lives up to its creepy name, creating what sounds like a legitimate nightmare on the first track of this new album. While the band does showcase white a bit of influence from grindcore and noise rock, the vocals on
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Radioactivity – s/t by Dirtnap Records If you’re in the mood for a no-frills power pop project in the Ramones tradition, then look no further than the latest, self-titled effort from Dirtnap Records signee Radioactivity. Being a Jeff Burke project, Radioactivity is expectedly filled to the brim with infectious
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Mind Spiders – Inhumanistic by Dirtnap Records With its reliance on synths and drum machines, its “tight, claustrophobic” recording, and its “Devo-influenced” aesthetic, Inhumanistic–the new album from Portland punk rock outfit Mind Spiders–certainly lives up to its title. This is without a doubt the group’s most understated effort
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Massachusetts Singer-songwriter Marissa Nadler is about ready to release July, the follow-up to her mini-album The Sister from 2012. “Dead City Emily” is the first song to drop from it, and it basically gives us what we have come to expect: deftly plucked guitars, poetic lyrics, and ghostly beautiful vocals.
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Folkie Josephine Foster has been pretty busy these past couple years, and now she’s releasing the follow up to last year’s quietly great Blood Rushing. It’s called I’m a Dreamer, and here’s the title track. It has a certain timeless quality, sounding as if it
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I’ve been on the fence about many albums this year, but this is one of the few where I’m torn. For every great moment on the new Arcade Fire record, there’s one that falls incredibly short of whatever stylistic mark the band was shooting for. Rather than
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On her debut, Rings, I was pretty impressed with the seductive songwriting and primal rhythms that made their way into the songs of Caren Mesirow, a.k.a. Glasser. While her music was obviously influenced, it was still really enjoyable. Interiors changes things in that regard, however. This time around,
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Alternative rock outfit Cage the Elephant completely surprises me with a record of songs that have uniformly interesting production, energetic performances, memorable hooks, sharp melodies, and a pretty diverse array of instrumentation.
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While Toxic Holocaust’s latest album is a fast, hard-hitting combination of thrash metal and punk, I think I prefer their earlier releases due to a total lack of surprises and variety on this one.
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AFI’s Burials is the latest in a long string of uninteresting records from this California band. While I’m not a big fan of the group’s early stuff, at least LPs like Sing The Sorrow had a modicum of aggression or excitement. The radio-friendly records the band has
