There’s an extremely 80s feel to Ex Hex. I get a false sense memory of sitting in the back of Monza when we pick up the college radio station at Washington State University, and being intrigued by hearing something a little different from the usual classic rock.
Where are we at on the “the only good Weezer album is Pinkerton” cycle? Seems like we’re due for a reaction to it at this point.
[Read More]I don’t want to profane this with my witless scribbling.
From a split release with Panopticon and Waldgeflüster, where the bands each contributed a long black metal song and a folk cover of a song from the other band. This is Panopticon’s cover, and I’m not familiar with the original, so I can’t really comment on how it differs. But it’s a nice listen, anyway.
[Read More]Here on Five Songs, mostly, we like our punk to be DIY and forgotten, mostly. I’m fine with some of the glossier stuff, but the underground shit just feels a lot more vital. There’s nothing special about All You Can Eat exactly, but this is fun, they’re just having a good time, they’re outta there in two minutes, hell yeah buddy.
It’s really such a shame that the Black Keys broke up after Brothers, their triumphant return to their big stompin’ psychedelic songs. I wonder what would have happened to them had they had a chance to build on their increasing popularity, and where they might have gone from here.
[Read More]The biggest exception to rap skits sucking is pretty much anything with Prince Paul involved. The framing device for De La Soul Is Dead, of an audio storybook detailing kids encountering the record for the first time, is delightfully self-refential and charming. And “cock snot” really is a vivid phrase.
If you call yourself Trigger Cut, you should really be twee indie rock. But no, we’ve got just pure muscular noise rock going here, sounding like nothing so much as vintage Hammerhead or maybe mid-period Unsane. So, yes, it’s throwing me back to the early 90s, just not in the direction the band name suggests.
[Read More]This song comes from the 2016 single Fear & Fury, which was released after their breakthrough record, Foundations of Burden. It was a wise piece of striking while the iron is hot. Pallbearer plays doom metal, heavy and reliant on plodding tempos, and managed to kind of crossover by being fairly accessible due to the clean vocals. This stuff is pretty good, and I like it in the right mood, and Pallbearer does it as well as anybody does.
[Read More]Before Mary Timony formed the brilliant Helium (and Wild Flag and Ex Hex!), she was in Autoclave, who put out a couple of EPs for Dischord Records which were later collected on a single comp. It’s an interesting piece of history, and for Timony fans, I do think it’s worth picking up, but it’s not on the same level as her later work. It IS extremely early 90s Dischord, though.
[Read More]I’ll have you know that I tried to insert a big ASCII barphic here saying “Josh is not qualified to talk about jazz”, but this stupid editor kept mangling it, and I’ll only go so far for a throwaway joke.
Is this the first Black Keys we’ve had? Brothers is the last Black Keys album I’ll have anything to do with. It’s a little strange - I like it quite a bit, there’s a lot of fun stuff on it, and I nevertheless didn’t even glance at the follow up to it. I’m not really sure why, exactly, but from reading reviews, it doesn’t seem like I’m missing much.
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