May 24, 2006

Quasi When The Going Gets Dark [5/5] On their seventh album in 13 years, Quasi’s Sam Coomes (Built To Spill, Elliott Smith) and Janet Weiss (Sleater-Kinney) are still divorced, still making music together, and still sounding as poisonous as ever. Effectively mixed by producer Dave Fridmann (Sleater-Kinney, the Flaming Lips, Thursday), the music on When...

Maritime We, The Vehicles [5/5] The ghosts of old bands hung all over Maritime’s 2004 debut, Glass Floor, and rightly so: Singer/guitarist Davey von Bohlen and drummer Dan Didier played in the wildly popular Promise Ring, and bassist Eric Axelson played in the should’ve-been-wildly huge Dismemberment Plan. From the start, Maritime have clearly been focused...

I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness Fear Is On Our Side [4/5] I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness hail from Austin, Texas–which is just about the last place on Earth you might expect, given the cloudy atmospheres and the Interpol-esque textures that pervade the quintet’s full-length debut. But Fear Is On Our Side...

The Essex Green Cannibal Sea [3/5] There’s a fine line between throwback and throwaway, but on their third album, Brooklyn-based indie-pop collective the Essex Green do a fine job of staying on retro’s good side. Cannibal Sea finds chief songsmiths Chris Ziter, Sasha Bell and Jeff Baron (plus collaborators) embracing classic pop sounds without being...

Isobel Campbell And Mark Lanegan Ballad Of The Broken Seas [3/5] Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood this ain’t: Mating twee pop with muscular country, singing about oral sex and love’s salvation, and covering Hank Williams’ “Ramblin’ Man” (while using a whip for percussion, no less) seem tawdry enough on paper. And when ex-Screaming Trees leader...

Band Of Horses Everything All The Time [2/5] For almost 10 years, Mat Brooke and Ben Bridwell made their bacon in Seattle indie-pop sad sacks Carissa’s Wierd. And where he played drums in that band, Bridwell handles the vocal work in Band Of Horses–which, while it obviously changes the new band’s sound, doesn’t really change...

The Appleseed Cast Peregrine [2/5] While the Appleseed Cast are adored for their lucid and melodic atmospheric rock, on their sixth album and Militia Group debut, the band do one better, introducing an elaborate conceptual storyline about a girl named Peregrine–who, after being accidentally killed by her father, returns as a ghost to avenge not...

Yakuza Samsara [5/5] On their third album for as many record labels since 1999, Chicago’s Yakuza take a big step forward from the “formula” of crazed-thrash-plus-screaming-free-jazz-sax established on their brilliant 2002 disc Way Of The Dead. They’ve slowed down a bit in the intervening four years, giving the songs (and the listener) room to breathe,...

Witchery Don’t Fear The Reaper [2/5] After unleashing one of the most vicious debuts in metal history with 1998’s Restless And Dead, and then following it up a year later with the equally merciless, mostly covers EP Witchburner, Swedish thrash masters Witchery fell off their collective broomstick with 1999’s Dead, Hot And Ready and never...