While there's no doubt that his voice is loaded with a healthy amount of excitement in conversation, there's no question that the dominant tone in singer Chris Cresswell's voice is one of relieved satisfaction. It wasn't easy, but everything is finally falling in line for The Flatliners as they gear up to release their fourth album, Dead Language on September 17, 2013 . “The last tour we...

I've been a fan of Vampire Weekend for years, which is not the easiest thing to admit because these guys are basically the hipster scapegoats for irrelevance. Is it because they wear new sweaters instead of vintage ones? Is it because boating people think they are edgy? I'm not sure. But, I've always liked this band, and I was glad to find that Modern Vampires in the City, their junior release, still holds up to the band's previous work. Vampire...

While No Age's last album was certainly a guilty pleasure, it just doesn't hold a candle to the quality of their new album, An Object. Sure, the band's third album was good, there's no arguing that, but his time No Age has ascended to a whole new level in their songwriting, arrangement and performance; not one song on An Object is forgettable or easy to skip – this album is just striking all the way through. Both those who were...

If The Stooges proved nothing else during their all-too-brief first run (before Iggy changed his surname to “Pop” and James Williamson joined in on guitar), they proved that “rock n' roll” was not synonymous with “rocket science.” In the multitude of explanations Iggy has made in the decades since then, he has been pretty forthright on the matter, actually; the general idea which drove The Stooges was to mimic a sound which was monolithic, simple and metallic – like a...

Those familiar with Palms and specifically who is in the band will not be surprised by what they hear on the band's self0titled debut at all. Such a statement might sound condemning but, in fact, it is intended to be an endorsement of the music; most times, all-star bands end up being boring or poor because the band goes out of its way to ignore the things that each bandmember contributing got a lot of praise for before in the...

While his name might not be the single most memorable in music at first (Dave Tough was also the name of a well-known jazz drummer in Dixieland and Swing era of the Thirties and Forties), it would be hard to overlook Dave Tough's voice after hearing this seven-inch. The singer had already made a pretty impressive mark on the Roots scene with the Silver Hearts but, all alone and singing as tentatively and quietly as he is here, those who...

Raw Geronimo play prog-structured music with the ferocity of punk rock. They combine tribal rhythms, guitars which alternate between aggressive and ethereal, and Laena Geronimo's no-limits voice to create a sound that hits hard and lingers long. After playing in a number of bands – including bass in The Like, and violin in Dante vs. Zombies and Skyline Electric, among many others – Geronimo assembled the band to focus on her own vocals and songwriting. They just released their debut...

To say that Nirvana's third and ultimately final studio album In Utero was 1993's most polarizing record would be the understatement of a decade. The unadorned sonic rawness of Steve Albini's recording laid bare every primal nuance of the most confrontational yet vulnerable material Kurt Cobain, Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl would ever record. And with its 1991 predecessor Nevermind having sold some 30 million copies, singlehandedly returning honest rock 'n' roll to the top of the pop charts, In...

Remember when punk rock didn't need to have a social message or studious comment in it to be great, it just needed to be loud, fast and either about a girl or about getting in trouble? That was great, that was fun and, if you grew up in Canada in the late Nineties, that was Chixdiggit all over. Other than being one of the first Canadian punk bands of their era to get widespread American attention (Chixdiggit's first album came...

Is it my lack of knowledge on the Flaming Lips or has the band's style changed a lot since Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots? Perhaps it's because, again, I'm arriving at The Terror so late to the game and my musical life right now consists mostly of catching up to the old stuff I never got around to when the albums were first released and the flurries of excitement were thicker. In the spirit of catching up, here we have...