Photo by Laura Musselman taken at Easy Street Records in Seattle, WA 3/17/06 Crocodile Cafe Seattle, WA March 17, 2007 Let’s spend it all like sailors, babe, and pretend we just got paid… The brief history of Philadelphia quintet Dr. Dog has been an extraordinarily lucky one. After their home-recorded 2004 album Toothbrush caught the […]
Author: Mary Mulholland
Neumo’s Seattle, WA March 7, 2007 A stalwart of Montreal’s rock ferment, Do Make Say Think consistently crafts elegant, meandering rock songs. Stripping song structures down to core elements, DMST take these strands—a guitar melody, the cool blow of a trumpet—and layer them with sounds to create universal, musical moods.
Rating: 6.0 I wouldn’t have predicted Explosions in the Sky to be such a popular band. They appeared on Conan O’Brian on February 20th, and an upcoming show at New York’s 1,500 capacity Webster Hall sold out a solid month in advance. Other successes have been easier to predict—the Smashing Pumpkins-influenced Silversun Pickups, the Led […]
Neumo’s Seattle, WA February 28, 2007 Montreal pop quintet Malajube takes risks. Their hugely operatic sophomore album Trompe L’Oeil veers into melodrama with drunken abandonment: like a friend made in a Parisian hostel, they’re loads of fun, mysterious and a little reckless—but in a way that only our less-jaded, foreign counterparts can be, they’re also […]
Rating: 7.75 Hand-picked by Thurston Moore for his Ecstatic Peace label, Pagoda plays traumatic, sludgy art rock: the musical incarnation of an adolescence spent immersed in the sounds of the nineties. One can see why Moore may have taken a personal liking to Pagoda: as he and Kim Gordon, both children of college professors, […]
Rating: 8.0 Kristin Hersh, unapologetic rocker and mother of four, could be a model for female musicians. Hersh—who would probably object to the unavoidable focus on her gender—has been a staple of indie rock for over two decades. With the strong, swelling melodies driving her new solo album Learn To Sing Like A Star, Hersh […]
Rating: 7.5 In listening to Yours To Keep, the solo debut of Strokes guitarist Albert Hammond Jr., one can’t escape comparing the album to the Strokes. I’ve always been a fan of Hammond Jr.’s razor-edged guitar playing and the Strokes’ impeccably tight presentation; Hammond is, in his way, a very good guitarist, and it follows […]