There are few devices in the English language and arts more regularly abused by bands than irony. It happens so regularly that it would be easy to assume the logic behind it goes something like, “We've got this idea that we want to try, but would likely be mocked mercilessly if we pursued it. That would be bad, but it's so bright and shiny and interesting! How can we make it work? Maybe if we add irony, it'll be a...
My pen name for my Ground Control column is The Aging Punk. Not The Aging Hippie, and certainly not The Aging Folkie. Much of my youth was spent actively fleeing and/or fighting the music presented on this disc, so it is surprising how much I enjoyed it. In its' commercial release, this CD accompanies a DVD documentary about The Troubadour, the Los Angeles club which helped launch the careers of so many singer/songwriters in the early Seventies. Unluckily, I wasn’t...
For his major label debut, Sam Beam of Iron & Wine told Spin that he wanted to make a record that “sounds like the music people heard in their parents' car growing up… that early-to-mid-‘70s FM, radio-friendly music.” I'd argue that this has always been at the core of his sound anyway, starting with the stripped down recordings of his earlier work and continuing through the country-infused sound of 2007's The Shepard's Dog. He returns with Kiss Each Other Clean,...
Jason Isbell and The 400 Unit have returned with Here We Rest, a southern-soul album recorded in their northern Alabama home of Muscle Shoals. It's an odd coincidence that Isbell's former band, Drive-By Truckers, has just released a new album (Go-Go Boots) focused on exploring the softer side of their sound. For the Truckers, this is likely a one-record deal, but Isbell seems to be moving in this softer direction permanently. Here We Rest’s sourthern-soul focus is far removed from...
As big a deal as The Strokes have been on the international rock scene for the last ten years, some people (this writer included) have been left cold and put off by the band. Why? From day one, the argument could be (and was, regularly) made that the band just sounded a little too proud of themselves and sure of their own stature as “rock gods.” This was true from the moment Is This It hit airwaves in 2001 and...
Hey there all you fine, upstandin' people, Sorry I'm a day late, but I hadda see a guy about a thing – ya know how it is. I may be a day late, but ain't comin' up short for ya, that's fo' sho' – innis issue o' da SWAG Report, I gotcha forty-six tracks o' da finest dope ya ever heard, an' even if ya dunno alla the artists that made it, trust me – ya should getcherself acquainted because...
Lengthening shadows stretching towards the dark edge of a sunset. That feeling when your heart sinks into your stomach. Horrifying. Bleak. Miserable. Beautiful. It can be tough to describe an album that hardly has words of its' own. Mamiffer’s newest album, Mare Decendrii, paints a vast landscape that engulfs your mind, guiding your imagination along every step of the way. The album starts out with a wailing guitar and dissonant piano, giving way to bass and little sprinkles of melody....
There was a time when a new R.E.M. album was highly anticipated and greeted eagerly, but that was twenty years ago. Now, the announcement of a new release from Georgia's favorite sons is more likely greeted with a shrug than a cheer. Why? Well, what does R.E.M. have to offer us today? As confrontational as that may sound, the good news is that Collapse into Now contains everything we have loved about R.E.M. in the past. The bad news is...
BitTorrent Inc., a leading innovator creating advanced technologies to efficiently move large files across the Internet, today announced that Sick of Sarah’s album 2205 has been downloaded over one million times since launch on February 15, according to trackers set up to monitor the album’s proliferation through the BitTorrent community. As of 5 p.m. March 15 (last night), the ClearBits.net trackers had registered 1,365,453 completed downloads of the album. The announcement comes as Sick of Sarah prepares to take the...
Listen to enough music and you start to notice patterns in the names that bands take; sometimes those names are little hints at what your ears will be getting into. For example, if it’s something offbeat and whimsical, the band probably plays some kind of indie shoe-gazer business. Conversely, if a band's name includes the word “Brothers” (but not bros), there’s a strong possibility for folk resurgence. Death metal bands must, as a rule, incorporate three consonants and two syllables...