Feb 18, 2010
Music
Web Exclusive
I’ve always been obsessed with Europe—particularly its compact countries that allow citizens to step from border to border at will. It’s blessed geography that allows them to indulge in mini-bouts of wanderlust in the span of a single weekend, forcing them to expand their comfort zone with multiple languages, cultures, and cusines—all a stone’s throw from home. On his third album Everyone Knows It’s Gonna Happen Only Not Tonight, Belgian musician Dieter Sermeus (The Go Find’s bandleader) perfectly evokes this pocket-sized yearning, fine-tuning electro-spattered folk that could take up residence in any number of indie rock “countries.”
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Feb 18, 2010
Music
Web Exclusive
Brian Jonestown Massacre was a force to be reckoned with in the late ‘90s, churning out album after album of stoned, ‘60s-flavored garage rock that was retro in the best sense of the word and always beholden to frontman Anton Newcombe’s peculiar anachronistic vision. But the 2000s saw Brian Jonestown Massacre on a consistent downward slide, it the apparent victim of both Newcombe’s creative eccentricities as well as his own self-destructive urges.
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Feb 16, 2010
Music
Moon Duo
Toppling the band’s two previous EPs, Escape takes Moon Duo’s hyper-repetitive psych drone to a new level of rock. While the drum (drum machine?) beats may never change and the bass riffs are three notes at the most, Moon Duo gets by with layers of rhythm topped with deliriously overdriven guitar wankery—I mean that in a good way.
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Feb 12, 2010
Music
Editors
For their third studio album In This Light and On This Evening, Britain’s Editors have swapped guitars for synths and pessimism for nihilism. However, in their attempts to procure an oppressively dark ambience, they have bypassed heroes Depeche Mode and New Order, landing straight in standard-issue mall-Goth territory—a place with little thematic variance.
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Feb 11, 2010
Music
Issue #29 - Year End 2009 - Best of the Decade
“I’ll lock the world away/Haunted by my better days,” Mark Oliver Everett, aka E, wheezes dejectedly on “Nowadays,” exhibiting the dignified sense of resignation that colors End Times, the second Eels album in less than 10 months, and light years away emotionally from his most recent, Hombre Lobo. Lobo found E assuming the fictional werewolf character “Dog Faced Boy,” waxing rapturously of unrequited love and desire. Here, he seems enmeshed in memory, consumed with the inevitable deterioration of relationships across time and distance, while still fitfully yearning for redemption.
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Feb 09, 2010
Music
Cold War Kids
How quickly they grow up. On their sophomore full-length, Fullerton, CA band Cold War Kids embraced their dance-rock side, shrieking for all who would hear, “something is not right with me.” Now, two years later, the wrongs have been righted and the “kids” are busy making their bid for VH1 immortality.
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Feb 01, 2010
Music
Issue #29 - Year End 2009 - Best of the Decade
A timeless pop song never goes out of fashion. From The Beatles, to R.E.M., to The Shins, a simple three-chord track that raises goose bumps is perhaps the most alchemical device in music. Florida’s Surfer Blood are acutely aware of these possibilities, and on their debut Astro Coast, they shimmy and sway through 10 tracks copiously laden with chill-inducing hooks.
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Jan 28, 2010
Music
Issue #29 - Year End 2009 - Best of the Decade
If Los Campesinos!’ first album, Hold on Now, Youngster, was the sound of worked-up adolescents pining for easy sex, and its rush-released follow up, We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed, the sound of crushed young adults learning there’s no such thing, the group’s latest, Romance is Boring, is the inevitable realization that even stable relationships don’t make sex any less elusive.
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Jan 27, 2010
Music
Issue #29 - Year End 2009 - Best of the Decade
As an actress, Charlotte Gainsbourg has made a career by placing herself in the hands of collaborators. In 2006, she took that theory into the studio for the first time in 20 years, working with Air, Jarvis Cocker, and Neil Hannon to create dreamy sophomore album 5:55. Now, four years later, Gainsbourg is back with a little help from a friend—this time, Beck.
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