It might sound deliberately contrary, but some records just slide by my sensibilities too easily. For me, the hook in a song isn't so much the device which convinces me to listen as it is the thing which gets stuck in my head and helps me remember the band at all; the hooks are the mnemonic devices I use to associate a band's sound with their image and makes their name both recognizable and memorable. Without that identifier, the sound...

One of the best habits that anyone who calls himself a “critic” can get into is to ignore all the hype which might be swirling around a band and just wait patiently for a new album to come out; it will prove definitively how much attention is actually deserved. That practice certainly served me well in METZ' case; the first time I heard about the band was from some scene-jumping hipster worm. He was singing the band's praises just loud...

After ten years of the band treading and then re-treading the same folky ground, most of those listeners who had run across Two Gallants could have been justified in thinking they probably had the band pegged. Over that time, the band has won a base of respectable (if not necessarily impressive) size, and no one really seemed to be complaining as they picked up what the band was putting down. That may have been all well and good for them...

Since Bob Dylan made his fantastic (second? third?) return with Love And Theft in 2001, the singer's fans have seemed to split into two communities: those who are great big fans and those who are great big critics. Those communities are so opposed in structure that it's almost comical; the fan community is only too happy to take any old thing that Dylan releases and tout it as the new gospel without question, while the “Critics” strike a dubiously high-minded...

Since her last full-length of original material in 2006, the woman born Charlyn Marshall has broken off a relationship with Giovanni Ribisi and cut off enough of her hair to get Robin Williams through chemotherapy for back cancer. The actor (Ribisi, not Williams) has since moved on, having married the despicably scrawny and grammatically pretentious Agyness Deyn as a poor substitute for this one-of-a-kind amazing basketcase. The hair, meanwhile, will presumably continue to grow. Clearly, Marshall was of a mind to shed...

More than in any other music genre, there is a treacherously thin line between awe-inspiring and awful in the world of metal. That is the line which Obey The Brave straddles on their debut album, Young Blood; by turns, this record succeeds brilliantly as singer Alex Erian and guitarists John Campbell and Greg Wood collide and make a perfect sound which combines the crunch of metal with the atmospherics inherent to both emo and prog – but there are also...

From the moment “Blood Red Youth” eases its way in to open Art History – California Wives' debut album – some listeners will just have a flood of images come rushing at them all at once: John Hughes movie posters, sequences out of Christian Slater movies, scenes from Cure, Pavement and Smashing Pumpkins music videos circa 1992, Replacements music videos released between 1985 and 1990 and more. Listeners will be surprised at how vividly and vibrantly those images come rushing...

Sometimes attempting to draw a line through music history to connect the different points which ultimately combined to present the portrait of a new record can be difficult, but that is not a problem from which anyone who hears Night Loop – the new album by Harlan – will suffer. The ingredients responsible doe the flavor are easy to pick out: a couple of pounds of Eighties new wave mixed with a cup of Brit-Pop and a table spoon of...

There are just so many things that it's possible to assume about Mother Mother as one digs into their fourth album, The Sticks. Those who became familiar with the band courtesy of their delirious and hyperactive breakthrough album, 2011's Eureka, will immediately assume that Mother Mother has elected to follow the “make a dark record after the breakthrough to frighten off fair-weather fans” route which was so fashionable at the end of last century, but that's really not likely. The...

Those of a certain age may remember events a little differently but, forty years after they started, it has become difficult to recall what Heart should have been known or remembered for – outside of maybe a few songs like “Crazy on You,” “Barracuda,” “Love Alive” and “Heartless.” How did something like that get forgotten? Unfortunately for them, Heart broke through in Canada before they made it in the U.S. (in spite of being American) and they were regularly brushed...