February 26, 2008

Small Arms Dealer Patron Saint Of Disappointment [4/5] If you imagine an extremely under-produced combination of early Rise Against and Strike Anywhere, you may have some sense of the raw, melodically inclined punk rock spat out by Long Island fivesome Small Arms Dealer. The three-year-old band shift between raging, aggressive tracks railing against organized...

The Menzingers A Lesson In The Abuse Of Information Technology [3.5/5] Scranton, Pennsylvania, may not be known as a cultural hotbed of rabble-rousing music. But it is the home of the Menzingers, a band loudly and proudly carrying on in the tradition of the Clash. Their debut full-length seethes with anger at the ills...

Giving Chase A Cheap Print Of A Masterpiece [3/5] Giving Chase are certainly keeping the memory of technical skate-punk alive, even if it means going about it in a way that strongly resembles their peers in A Wilhelm Scream. Granted, GC tool with the formula somewhat, adding more contrast to their vocalists and a...

Bob Burns And The Breakups Terminal Breakdown [3.5/5] If the members of New Bomb Turks all had little brothers who sat outside the garage door listening to them practice, then decided to start their own band, Bob Burns And The Breakups are what you would get. Therefore, it’s not surprising they joined their “big...

Good Views, Bad News Fat Wreck Chords must be on hold for now. Pop-punk records probably should not exceed much more than half an hour, so Broadway Calls already break a cardinal rule by stocking their self-titled debut with 40 minutes of the stuff. Still, the Portland, Oregon, reps are adept songwriters, highlighted best by...

Andrew Jackson Jihad People Who Can Eat People Are The Luckiest People In The World [4/5] To say this album lives up to the darkly comic promise of its title is, by all accounts, an understatement. One track (“Bells & Whistles”) starts with “I have often wondered, if a pregnant woman is decapitated, will...

White Williams Smoke [3.5/5] If blogosphere buzz counts for anything-and you can bet your Brooklyn Vegan-reading ass it does-then White Williams will blow up any minute now. Having emerged from Cleveland’s DIY electronic-music scene with Gregg “Girl Talk” Gillis won’t hurt his media profile, either. As for Williams’ debut album, Smoke is a refreshingly earnest,...

Sole And The Skyrider Band Sole And The Skyrider Band [2.5/5] “You can’t be 30 and still making hip-hop/You can’t kill God with a slingshot.” So opines Sole, the man as responsible as anyone for making underground beats accommodate abstract Beat poetry. But perhaps the verse above-and this disc as a whole-represents a mid-career...

Mac Lethal 11:11:00 AM [4/5] Mac Lethal, a self-described “Irish pothead who flows with no hair,” riffs cleverly on everything from the opportunistic activism of protest songs to the painful redundancy of recent Tool albums. Boasting a comedian’s arsenal (he name-checks Bill Hicks and raps about using Mitch Hedberg’s brainstem as a quill), Mac...