My, how time flies. It was seven years ago, almost to the day, that I attended my first Noise Pop show—an amazing evening at the Great American Music Hall featuring a little-known band called Jimmy Eat World. My college roommate and I drove to S.F. for the evening, got our car locked overnight in a parking garage in the Tenderloin that closed at midnight, and spent the night on the streets of the city’s sketchiest neighborhood avoiding catcalls from Polk...

As paradoxical as it sounds, Hey Venus sounds precisely like what those unfamiliar with Super Furry Animals would expect an album by the band to sound like, but they never have until now and the band has honestly never sounded so good. For the first time, singer Gruff Rhys and company have stopped resisting their inclination to indulge in every single solitary super sound of the seventies and discovered that they’re able to make those sounds vital again in so...

If one were to look up ‘idiosyncrasy’ in the dictionary—particularly one compiled and edited by the rock press—it’d be totally reasonable to discover a photograph of Mountain Goats’ singer/guitarist/mastermind John Darnielle next to the entry. Since 1995, Darnielle has played the role of mysterious maker of music masterfully and worn the mantle well—deciding to record on everything from a cheap department store boom box to the mixing desk in a world-class studio depending upon his mood—and...

Los Angeles natives Midnight Movies will be following up their second full length LP, Lion The Girl, with a brand new EP titled Nights out digitally this March 11. Midnight Movies expanded the neo-shoegaze movement on their aforementioned LP, and Nights aims to reinvent that sound with a new remixed, punk-electro urgency that is beautifully juxtaposed against frontwoman Gena Oliver’s wounded vocals. Furthermore, ostracized former Smashing Pumpking, James Iha, has provided percussion that is said to interject the album with...

This is a very well produced film, featuring interviews with Klaus Voorman, Anthony De Curtis, Maureen Cleaves and Barry Miles, among others, and chock full of clips (with sound!) from The Beatles’ Ed Sullivan performances, the first US tour, the Royal Variety performance and the MTV-style videos that were produced for shows like Ready, Steady, Go!, Shindig, etc. We get the rehashed stories of the verbal agreement that Lennon and McCartney made to share credit for any song that the...

After six long years since the release of the The Notwist’s minimal-pop album Neon Golden, the band announced another full-length to hit the streets called The Devil, You + Me. The German-based band been busy working on side project after side project—13 & God, Themselves, Console—and are probably itching to get this one finished. The Notwist recorded portions of the album with the Andromeda Mega Express Orchestra, a 20+ headed classical orchestra that specializes in exciting, and sometimes bizarre, avant...

Let me start this review by saying I went to this show strictly to see Saviours. I have been listening to their new album, Into Abaddon, pretty much non stop since it was released earlier this year, and after missing them live more than a few times lately, there was no way I was going to miss them tonight. First up was Orchid, a local band whom I surprisingly had never heard of. With a perfect combination of groove and...

Colin Meloy has taken any number of jaunts sans his fellow Decemberists, and for those unwilling to believe, Colin Meloy Sings Live! will provide audio documentation of how wrong they can be. The album, out April 8th, captures the wayward Decemberists frontman on the road in 2006, as he toured the country all by his lonesome shilling Colin Meloy Sings Shirley Collins, a tour-only EP along the lines of his first solo release, Colin Meloy Sings Morrissey. In support of...

It seems as if Dan Bejar has put some of his many other projects (The New Pornographers, Swan Lake and Hello, Blue Roses) on the temporary back burner in order to take his flagship, the HMCS Destroyer (not actually a ship in the Canadian Navy's fleet, just go with me on the wordplay) out on tour. The two month jaunt—which is preceeded by an appearance at the Merge Records showcase at SXSW—is in support of the new Destroyer album Trouble...

The middle of this decade marked yet another significant shift in heavy music. Bands such as Saviours, Torche and Early Man were dropping debut albums; at the same time, more established indie-metal bands like Mastodon, Killswitch Engage and Shadows Fall were signing major label deals. Headbanger’s Ball was back on the air and tons metal festivals were crisscrossing the globe with fans of all ages supporting metal acts that spanned close to 40 years. And for probably the first time...