Whether it’s intentional or not, some bands can’t seem to help but have a polarizing effect on all listeners with whom their music comes into contact. Whether it’s the combination of sounds that the group chooses to intermingle, the way they put those sounds together or even just the voices and effects used to administer the group’s ideas, listeners are instantly either turned on or put off of a band within seconds of sampling an album. There is no halfway...

Let it never be said that punks aren’t industrious. Since forming in 2002, Winnipeg’s Comeback Kid has managed to break out of nowhere and position themselves among the top bands in the national hierarchy of “Bands That Matter” and, on the strength of just three albums along with an Ironman‘s touring schedule, won themselves a rabid global following. That in and of itself is impressive, but not content to rest on laurels, the band recently embarked upon a most ambitious...

In the last forty years, many groups of musicians have stepped forward boasting that the strains they’re making will “expand your mind” and/or “alter your consciousness” but, for my money, while 13th Floor Elevators, Pink Floyd, Jefferson Airplane, Flaming Lips, Mogwai, Apples In Stereo and the dozens of others that have offered to feed your head and expand your mind have their charms, the only true mind-expanding exercise to be had comes from laying back with a dub reggae record...

Some side project bands seem destined to appear. For example, when Kim Deal broke away from The Pixies to get some more of her music heard out from under the watchful eye of Frank Black, it made sense; when James Iha did the same thing a few years ago apart from Smashing Pumpkins, no one was shocked and no one faulted him in the slightest. That Jackson United’s debut long-player has surfaced, however, is quite a shock. Front man/guitarist Chris...

Once every decade or so, a band appears seemingly from nowhere that mixes equal amounts of pop, punk and rock so perfectly – they hit that serene balance so evenly that it doesn’t fit easily under any of the aforementioned tags – that it compels the loudest upholders of each to rush in and try to claim the group as their own. This decade, it’s a band that walks out of the wilds of New Jersey with a quiver full...

I actually like the Fall. It means a gnarly winter is on its way, but before it shows up there is just this sort of chill and beauty around that makes you stop and think for a bit about, I don’t know, life or something. The other thing about Fall is how much new music is released during this season. Fall and SXSW are the two major times for music it seems like, so I’m all for the Fall. Which...

There are ways of setting a tone for a film that paint a picture, and then there are ways of setting a tone that frame it – essentially encapsulating the entirety of the forthcoming proceedings and giving a clue as to what you’re going to see with a few words but without giving the whole thing away – thus baiting as well as exciting potential viewers into what feels like will be an event or, better still, a happening. Rant...

From the opening false start of “Real Love,” an image instantly manifests in a listener’s mind that only gets set firmer when Lucinda Williams growls petulantly into her microphone. If it can bee assumed that 2007’s West was, in fact, a stoic and dry-eyed kiss-off to a former lover, as Little Honey warms up listeners are given the impression that the split might not have been so clean. Rather than the other party leaving, as listeners might have assumed of...

It has been said so often at this point that it might as well be a mantra in music criticism: “Of course AC/DC records still sell well – they`ve made the same one nineteen times.” On the surface, it certainly seems that way – one can construct a representative record of theirs from memory: take blues and Chuck Berry riffs, add a bunch of sexual energy and innuendo and a diminutive guitar god, shake well and serve. It seems easy...

There are ways of setting a tone for a film that paint a picture, and then there are ways of setting a tone that frame it – essentially encapsulating the entirety of the forthcoming proceedings and giving a clue as to what you’re going to see with a few words but without giving the whole thing away – thus baiting as well as exciting potential viewers into what feels like will be an event or, better still, a happening. Rant...