May 31, 2007

Young Love Too Young To Fight It [3/5] Have you ever wanted to take an emo band, slap them and tell them to loosen the eff up? Dan Keyes did that himself (without getting slapped, we assume) when he put the breaks on his buzzworthy Austin group Recover (major-label deal, tours with Jimmy Eat World,...

Maher Shalal Has Baz L’Autre Cap [3/5] Japanese jazz-pop outsiders turn shambolic amateurism into art. Maher Shalal Hash Baz have been peddling a distinctively intimate, lo-fi pop naiveté to a slavish cult following for over 20 years. These Japanese outsiders don’t care about trends, airplay or MySpace page hits, and they don’t even have a...

Busdriver RoadKillOvercoat [3/5] It’s no surprise Regan Farquhar has hip-hop running through his blood. Heck, his dad was the screenwriter for the classic rap film Krush Groove. Under the name Busdriver, Farquhar has been a major player in the underground scene since 1993 as a member of the Project Blowed crew. On his fifth record...

Antimc It’s Free But It’s Not Cheap [4/5] Antimc (aka Matthew Alsberg) first came to public attention while producing tracks for his and Radioinactive’s 2004 album Free Kamal. The disc was a hip-hop-centric hodgepodge of dub, astral jazz, ethnodelia, warped easy listening and other quirky marginalia that has long been Mush Records’ steez. Now with...

Aluminium Aluminium [3.5/5] Given White Stripes founder Jack White’s constant desire to branch out musically-but not at the risk of losing his soul-it’s surprising that he hasn’t written a concerto for rock duo and orchestra. Instead, he let someone else do it: Aluminum is a collection of White Stripes songs arranged as orchestral works by...

The Good, The Bad & The Queen The Good, The Bad & The Queen [3/5] The first quote in the press release accompanying the debut disc from The Good, The Bad & The Queen is from Damon Albarn, the sonic CEO of GB&Q, Gorillaz and Blur. “I thought, just as an experiment, how would Tony...

Wax On Radio Exposition [2.5/5] There is a difference between being artistic and creating the façade of being artistic; and Wax On Radio, the latest musical darlings to come out of the Chicago scene, are guilty of the latter. Although the languid, layered tracks are compelling and smoothly produced, their entire debut-particularly the straight-out-of-high-school-poetry-class lyrics-aims...

Switchfoot Oh! Gravity. [3.5/5] San Diego’s Switchfoot are one of the most under-appreciated pop bands around, a quintet whose unbridled optimism and reach-for-the-moon lyrics separate them from their peers. But after a string of gems (especially the keyboard-speckled single “This Is Your Life”), the spiritual group slipped a bit on 2005’s uneven, bland Nothing Is...

Sloan Never Hear The End Of It [4/5] Sloan are probably Canada’s most underrated band. Like, ever. After 15 years together-without a single lineup change-they’re not exactly in line to be your little sister’s next favorite band. Because the 30(!) songs on Sloan’s eighth full-length are so varied, the album doesn’t aim to capture a...