Basking in the summer sun, a crowd of beautiful young people gathered together with barbecue and plastic cups of beer on a recent Saturday to listen to the sun-drenched, island-flavored indie rock of Islands. Except we weren't on a tropical beach—we were in a parking lot on the east side of Manhattan, flanked by a highway and the not-particularly inviting waters of the East River. But then, Islands' songs are mostly about dying of thirst under a blistering sun, so...
How strange is the world that Amanda Palmer has sketched for herself. Since she first appeared with Dresden Dolls professing to perform a “Brechtian punk cabaret” – so named because the singer couldn’t bear the thought of letting others mistakenly call it something synonymous with ‘goth’ – Palmer (along with drummer Brian Viglione) has reveled in producing a series of three-penny psychodramas that, with each successive release, put more flesh on the grainy bones of a strange, sepia tone celluloid...
When Coldplay first appeared ten years ago sporting distinctly collegiate guitar tones and singing about the color yellow, every reasonable assumption was that Britain had won the global race to break a modestly intentioned, heart-on-its-sleeve (and hence non-threatening) indie band and negotiated a way to present the sound on the largest imaginable scale. They were huge from the word go, but amazingly they got even bigger; A Rush Of Blood To The Head did better than evade the sophomore slump,...
Anyone who assumed (and rightly so) that, after five albums (plus one more live offering) and thirteen years of pushing themselves beyond conventionally observed limits of human endurance (the road stories of band members continuing to play after sustaining serious injuries at shows are well-documented), Iowa’s leading musical export would either ease up or attempt a safer musical avenue would be dead wrong. If anything, All Hope Is Gone illustrates the exact opposite; for their sixth studio-recorded album, Slipknot has...
For the last twenty-nine years, Negativland has successfully weathered lawsuits, scrutiny both political and personal, hatred, envy and adulation as well as inciting anger, unease and revulsion in every corner of the musical landscape with which they’ve come into contact. That’s no small feat for any band, but what the group has achieved becomes totally unbelievable when you realize that they’ve done it without uttering a single original word; the audio has always been composed of a pastiche of samples...
Montreal’s own Land of Talk announced not too long ago that a new album was in the works and I’ve been counting down the days till the newest addition to the Saddle Creek roster was going to drop that bomb on the indie world. The release date for Some Are Lakes is October 7, 2008, and you can pre-order that bad boy here. And in true modern-day fashion, Land of Talk are giving people a sneak peak at the song...
Funny thing about Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young – the member that joined last has been singularly responsible for keeping the other three from going broke. Since the group’s hippy-dippy heyday in the early 70s, Neil Young has kept a constant release schedule and has been the one to – perhaps out of a sense of charity – keep reconvening the quartet as their stacks of medical bills grow ever taller and continually rehash the same well-worn standards for a...
For some bands, comparisons to other groups that came before them are unavoidable. For members of the press, it just can’t be helped; in order to describe to other people what a band sounds like in print without the benefit of allowing readers to also hear what they’re talking about, the names of established acts that everyone has heard get dragged out in order to increase interest in a group that is just beginning to break out. It could be...
For some bands, comparisons to other groups that came before them are unavoidable. For members of the press, it just can’t be helped; in order to describe to other people what a band sounds like in print without the benefit of allowing readers to also hear what they’re talking about, the names of established acts that everyone has heard get dragged out in order to increase interest in a group that is just beginning to break out. It could be...
It has often been said that the best art tends to be borne of frustrating or generally inclement conditions. The nature of creation—whether forced or not—can often be mentally taxing (just ask Van Gogh or Hemmingway) and it isn’t uncommon for an artist to begin questioning the validity of a project if there are enough obstacles between the point they’re at and where he or she envisions the terminus of the endeavor to be. In singer/guitarist Nick Thorburn’s case, that...