Jason Schreurs

A Lot Like Birds No Place On A Lot Like Birds’ second album, the Sacramento, California, six-piece have taken the everything-goes approach they used on their debut, Conversation Piece, and worked meticulously to carefully rein it in—almost had you there. Nope, the band are still a maelstrom of screechy vocals and kinetic riffing one minute, and then […]

Pentimento Inside The Sea EP Two lines into “Not So Young,” the opening track of the new EP by Pentimento, vocalist/guitarist Jeramiah Pauly sings, “It’s bringing me back to when I was young, but not so young that I couldn’t sort my feelings out.” That’s exactly the emotions that these four new songs by the […]

Heartsounds Internal Eyes On album No. 3, melodic punk rockers Heartsounds have branched out and created a batch of songs that goes beyond the ’90s Fat Wreck Chords/Epitaph worship the band were formed on. With metallic riffs that pay homage to guitarists/vocalists Ben Murray and Laura Nichol’s previous band, melodic thrash/death metal outfit Light This […]

Cage The Elephant Melophobia There’s a lot happening on Melophobia, the third album by Kentucky rock band Cage The Elephant. The five members spent time separately concocting their own ideas for the album after a lengthy period of time together on the road. The resulting album is, at its best, ambitious and teeming with ideas […]

Dangerkids Collapse If songs that start with an emo white guy proclaiming “yo” before zipping into hip-hop rhymes sounds like a good time, and if you have a weak spot for classic Linkin Park, Dangerkids are probably going to be your new favorite band. As gimmicky as it sounds to be doing the Linkin Park […]

Stray From The Path Anonymous First of all, can someone, anyone, tells us what that weird spitting noise is that Stray From The Path vocalist Andrew “Drew York” Dijorio makes on pretty much every song on this album? Whatever it is, it fucking rules! Verse, chorus, blllllleeeeeck. This Long Island hardcore band has been toiling […]

Human Parts Human Parts No, it’s not even close to being as good as Against Me!'s best work, but there’s definitely something very likeable about Human Parts, the debut album and new band from former AM! bass player Andrew Seward. In the context of a musician who’s been on the road for the better part […]

Direct Hit! Brainless God Concept albums are usually either the territory of prog-metal bands or some dude having a mid-career crisis. So when it was announced that Milwaukee pop-punkers Direct Hit! were serving up a concept album for their Red Scare debut, the details which seem to involve religion, serial killers, the apocalypse and who […]

Hands Like Houses Unimagine Australian emotional rockers Hands Like Houses probably shouldn’t have named their second album Unimagine: too many easy jokes about it being unimaginative and all of that. Songs like “A Fire On A Hill” and “Introduced Species” have all the right ingredients of emotive rock: the crooning singer, sweeping guitars, dabblings of […]