A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the We All Want The Same Things LP by Craig Finn. Saying that some musicians are just natural-born rock phenomena might sound unbelievable on the face of the statement, but let’s be honest – some rock singers/frontmen were built for the job and could not easily be seen doing anything else. Where else, for example, could anyone imagine seeing Jeff Tweedy or Neil Young but at stage centre in front of a...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the 2LP Astralwerks reissue of Come With Us by The Chemical Brothers. Ever experienced a moment when, through no fault of its own, an album just seems to go underappreciated and/or just generally taken for granted, reader? It’s not an incredibly common occurrence, but it does happen; every so often, an album will suffer because it really just feels like “more of the same,” no matter how good it might be. For...

Teenage Bottlerocket Tales From Wyoming Teenage Bottlerocket are the purveyors of skate pop punk in our modern times. They’re not reinventing the wheel, of course, but it helps to understand this band if you consider that they’re just sticking to a formula and tampering with it. And what a formula it is: Teenage Bottlerocket are responsible for some of the catchiest melodies and sauciest riffs in the genre. Strangely, they haven’t written their masterpiece yet, and instead have kept on...

In addition to their upcoming Punk Rock Bowling date in Las Vegas, the Soviettes are reuniting on May 6th at the Turf Club in St. Paul for a Celebration and Fundraiser for Libby Johnson. Front woman Annie Sparrows added the following: Ok here it is. My old band The Soviettes are reuniting with all original members for a hometown benefit show for our bestie Libby!!! The show is Saturday May 6th at the Turf Club. Capital!Capital is also reuniting to...

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Ultimate Collection, Vol. 1 by Kevin Eastman, Peter Laird The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are a force that transcends generations. My version of the heroes in a half shell involves the Saturday morning cartoon on TV in the early 90s: what I consider to be the “right” content for turtles fan. I just couldn’t get enough of them, and considering how slim the pickings were for a kid growing up in the Caribbean, I did...

Murray McLauchlan Love Can’t Tell Time (True North Records) When your body of work spans nineteen albums released over a 46-year period, it’s obvious that your love affair with music is a lifelong one. Such is really the only way it could be possible to take Love Can’t Tell Time, Murray McLauchlan’s newest release – by the singer’s own admission, the album is, “A great collection of songs I love to play when I have no other agenda than just...

Moonglow by Michael Chabon I know we run a column here on Ground Control called I Wanna Be Literated but the fact is we’re not literary guys here on the site. We know what we like, but we’re not going to argue for or against an Oxford comma, for example. One thing is clear, though: this reviewer definitely has a soft spot for Michael Chabon. I first heard about Chabon on the Simpsons (again, we are NOT literary guys) and...

Old 97’s Graveyard Whistling (ATO/Cadence) The Old 97’s have been touted as one of the alt-country greats for years now but, really, one of the things that has kept listeners coming back for a while now has been the band’s steadfast refusal to believe their own hype and just try to make an album which comes close to answering it. Now, at first, that modesty was cute (what music fan doesn’t like pulling for their heroes against the odds?), but...

King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard Flying Microtonal Banana (ATO/Cadence) Listening to King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard’s ninth album, Flying Microtonal Banana, one is inspired to recall Karl Marx’s fairly damning summation of history’s propensity for repeating itself – “the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce. In this case, there’s no denying that the fairly delightful rock n’ roll King Gizzard is peddling is the farcical incarnation of the psychedelic rock which first materialized in...

Five Alarm Funk Sweat (independent) Without intending to come off as trite, there are occasions when it’s possible to mark certain similarities between a new album and music which has appeared elsewhere in music history, but those moments can still reverberate with excitement because no one saw that music or the connection to anything else coming – from anywhere, ever. Such a moment hit me the moment that the music on Five Alarm Funk’s new album, Sweat, began to emanate...