May 17, 2010

Mr. Invitation Amazon.com Widgets Smallman http://www.smallmanrecords.com/

Rifoki Before his current incarnation as a globetrotting DJ, Steve Aoki made music the old fashioned way: with his throat. In This Machine Kills, he screamed and preached a righteous hardcore gospel inspired by Born Against and the Ebullition Records roster. Fast-forward 10 years, and Aoki has teamed up with Italy's Bob Rifo (of electronica...

Only Revolutions Though Biffy Clyro have been tearing up the U.K. charts for several years, their presence has been a slow burn in the U.S. Puzzles, their 2007 breakthrough chronicling frontman Simon Neil's struggle with his mother's death, should've been the album that worked U.S. rock fans into a tizzy, but for reasons mostly unexplainable, it...

Vagabonds The Classic Crime don't seem to know what kind of face they want to present to the world. At times, they proclaim themselves (through their floppy-haired mouthpiece Matt MacDonald) as humble young men bearing the weight of the world on their collective shoulders. Other times, they are confrontational, gladly suffering the slings and arrows...

The Last Place You’ll Look There must be something about Scotland that breeds introspective, intense musicians. We Were Promised Jetpacks, a foursome from Glasgow whose debut, These Four Walls, came out last June, accompany Frightened Rabbit and the Twilight Sad on a path of pensive, moody indie-rock songs that seethe with emotion. Frontman Adam Thompson has...

In Medias Res PMToday (who'd like their band name written lowercase, but life is filled with disappointments) are a band of brothers from Arkansas who open their debut album with an acoustic-guitar-driven number about how life is filled with disappointments. The next song starts off, "This is me, neglected and obsolete/I am incomplete." Yeah, they're...

Alligator Alligator contains a whopping 17 remixes of Canadian songsmiths Tegan And Sara's single "Alligator" by an army of droppable names in the fields of indie rock, electronica and the grey area between the two. With so many artists operating within similar parameters, the extensively extended single harbors a healthy sense of competition. Passion Pit win...

The Get Up Kids Simple Science While the idea of old, broken up and/or underrated bands reuniting for a second go 'round the festival circuit isn't exactly a new one–especially in the contemporary punk and emo scene, where the phrase “indefinite hiatus” usually morphs itself into “cash-grab tour” within 36 months–it's significantly rarer for a...

The Spill Canvas Realities Although the Spill Canvas are working on their fifth album, the South Dakota foursome continue to release stopgap EPs in the interim. This five-song disc follows shortly on the heels on their three-song teaser, Abnormalities, which came out in January and offered a brief sense of where the group are heading. In...