Based in Paris, Nouvelle Vague has made a career out of taking old punk, new-wave and post-punk songs and giving them a unique reinterpretation — often with the cooperation and participation of the original bands. Marc Collin and Olivier Libaux put a kind of bossa nova, lounge and French pop…
The best punk rock always has a busted heart shivering beneath all the bluster and distortion. It’s a stretch to say that Throwaway Sunshine can be so simply labeled, but there’s no denying the punch, grit and world-weary determination of its full-length debut, For Everything We’re Not. Fronted by Cory…
Skeptics in Love follows a young couple into, and then back out of, love. It is not based on a single experience of any member of kosmøs, which is probably why lyricist Ben Tonak was able to step back far enough to view the thing from all sides. So the…
This album’s title, Collages, serves as a statement of purpose and a summation of the aesthetic of the band up to this point. The instrumentation and sampled sounds here overlap and complement each other in vibrantly varied configurations. “Spirit Stone,” for instance, seems to channel Ceremonial-era Savage Republic in its…
There’s not much appealing about the plain-Jane cover art that adorns Megan Burtt’s debut, which might prompt less-discerning listeners to pass this one up — and how wrong that would be. Over the course of a dozen tracks, Burtt shows off a stellar voice that splits the difference between Linda…
Anvil started out as Lips in 1978, but by the time it released its debut album, Hard ‘N’ Heavy, in 1981, it was going by the name we know today. The first three Anvil albums, including Metal on Metal and Forged in Fire, pioneered a furiously fast and aggressive music…
Just because a star was bred in Hollywood doesn’t necessarily mean he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Just take Mickey Avalon, the unlikely king of Los Angeles’s swanky clubs. He came from beginnings far beyond dubious and well into deranged, a fact he’s celebrated in his…
The Finnish city of Helsinki is one of extremes, where daylight lingers for nineteen hours during the summer yet is present for a mere six at the winter solstice. It’s the kind of place that might embrace a sunny, open approach to music at one moment while delving into the…
Haven’t had a chance to watch the Apple keynote yet and kind of wondering if we need to at this point. From the sounds of it, the ingenuously named iPad (killed a lot of brain cells there, eh, Apple?) sounds like a enlarged, glorified iTouch. We gleened this notion, of…
As music critics — and people who generally think about, talk about, listen to and make music — the most common question we get asked (and ask each other, for that matter) is, “What are you listening to right now?” The pervasiveness of this query is precisely what inspired Heavy…
Bad news for those hoping to relive the ’90s this weekend at the Ogden Theatre. We’ve just received word that Open Wings and Broken Strings, the traveling time capsule tour featuring Eddie Kowalczyk of Live, Art Alexakis of Everclear and Leigh Nash of Sixpence None the Richer, slated for a…
This week’s top flier rode into that slot on a wave of nostalgia (and indigestion). That image of a classic TV dinner poked us deep int he subconscious and stirred up memories of being plunked down in front of the old boob tube in our youth, served up with Swanson’s…
White Denim is to modern psychedelic post-punk what Alice Donut was to punk rock — weird and unafraid to let their varied musical freak flags fly. Across the Austin trio’s latest record, Fits, you can hear elements of old progressive rock, garage rock, jazz, splintered blues, as well as aesthetic…
We’re going to go out on a limb here and guess that the budget ($25) for I Am the Dot’s new video was far less than what it cost Meese to create its fancy new video. Just the same, the clip “Love Song for Camus” is no less enthralling visually,…
On its Just So You Know music blog yesterday, AOL had the exclusive premiere of Meese’s brand-new video for “Tell Me It’s Over,” the unabashedly sugary single previously known as “The Start of It.” We’d embed it here for you, but that would seem to invalidate the whole notion of…
In case you were unaware, the darlings of the music industry have decided a regular music album wasn’t enough and moved into the visual arena. Yep, America’s favorite eukaryotic organism-themed band, Animal Collective, has teamed with filmmaker Danny Perez to make what it’s coining a “visual album” titled Oddsac. Before…
Infomercial get-rich-quick schemes are a little like weight-loss scams: both of them take something that’s relatively simple — work more to make more money, eat less to lose weight — and pretend that there’s a magic path through all the time and effort and commitment it takes. It’s all about…
The Knife has made some ridiculously incredible music in the past ten years. In fact, the act has won quite a few awards for it, mostly in their native Sweden. Last year, one half of the sibling duo recorded an album using the moniker Fever Ray, and she just won…
Apparently Youtube launched a Pandora-esque service last week dubbed the Music Discovery Project with very little fanfare. Near as we can tell, it functions the same way as services like Last.fm and Pandora and operates based on some crazy mathematic algorithm we can’t wrap our tiny minds around, “Find >…
Storied Denver band Vaux is no more, which means no more Vaux shows, which means the last time you saw them is literally the last time you saw them. That makes us sad, since Vaux were always one of the best, most visceral live bands going. But if we’re not…
As technology moves forward, we’ve found new and interesting ways to make, record and brainstorm music on the go. There has been a flood of music production and recording applications for devices like the iPhone/iPod Touch, Nintendo DS, PSP and others. Finding worthwhile applications is another story, so starting today…
No doubt capitalizing on Joe King’s recent collaboration on “Undertow,” from Shock Value II, his latest effort, and the fact that the band happens to be in town that day, Timbaland has evidently invited the Fray to make a cameo at his show at the Gothic on Tuesday, January 26…
