February 26, 2008

Prefuse 73 Preparations [4/5] Preparations starts with the same digital chime glitch we’ve come to associate with other releases from Prefuse 73 mastermind Scott Herren. The signature no-reverb snare bips pop over the same tell-tale undulating basslines, lulling listeners into a sense of predictability, if not outright disappointment. Here, as Superchunk might say,...

Avenged Sevenfold Avenged Sevenfold While Avenged Sevenfold’s look and sound have evolved drastically over the past decade, the one constant in the band’s career has been their ability to polarize people-and the band’s self-titled disc is inevitably going to make that division more pronounced. The confrontational pro-war opener “Critical Acclaim” sees vocalist M. Shadows channeling...

Angels & Airwaves I-Empire It was easy to get caught up in the web of hype Tom DeLonge spun for Angels & Airwaves’ 2006 debut We Don’t Need To Whisper. But after the dust settled, we were left with a solid melodic-rock album that withstood most of the backlash from DeLonge’s hyperbole. (Although 18 months...

Zookeeper Becoming All Things [2/5] Musically, Zookeeper’s Chris Simpson seems to have a bad habit of not finishing what he started-from dismantling emo progenitors Mineral at the height of their success to letting the woefully underrated Gloria Record languish in dreampop oblivion. So it’s not surprising (although still disappointing) to hear how unfocused Zookeeper’s...

Streetlight Manifesto Somewhere In The Between [3.5/5] What’s confounding about Somewhere In The Between is how little Streetlight Manifesto have stylistically changed since Everything Goes Numb’s release in 2003. Their first proper album in more than four years, the band’s colossally bold and sharp brass lines and frenetically jangled upstrokes mixed with frontman Tomas...

The Color Fred Bend To Break [4.5/5] Taking Back Sunday guitarist Fred Mascherino, known here as the Color Fred, has been not-so-secretly penning songs for his own individual vision since his pre-TBS days in Philadelphia emo band Breaking Pangaea. The songs on his solo debut, which are grander than the usual solo-album fare of...

Saves The Day Under The Boards When Saves The Day released Sound The Alarm in 2006, it wasn’t so much a return to form as it was a new, refined, mature band who could be both aggressive and poppy, a duality 2003’s In Reverie severely lacked. While the record was warmly received, no one realized...

Intramural This Is A Landslide [4/5] By their very nature, collaboration albums tend to be disjointed affairs. Often, the result is a spotty compilation effort at best. So it’s to Denver Dalley’s great credit that he’s managed to create a truly unified, moving and in some ways anachronistic whole: An actual capital-A Album....

Ire Works Without a doubt, anyone reading about the Dillinger Escape Plan circa 2007 will see plenty of variations on the most famous old Nietzsche maxim: Because all that hasn’t killed this New Jersey quintet-namely a legacy of label/contractual problems and the gradual drop-off of all but one original member-has certainly made them stronger. But...