On Independent Music

Those who loved Taking Up Serpents Again, Curtis Eller’s excellent 2004 collection of banjo-driven Americana, pre-rock roots-folk and ragtime ruminations, need not tread cautiously when considering his latest, another 10-track offering dubbed Wirewalkers and Assassins. Few records this year have been as adept at mining the successes of their predecessors while still sounding refreshing and [...]

Sam Phillips Club Café – Pittsburgh, PA Sept. 12, 2008 And now, 150 words on Sam Phillips’ first performance in Pittsburgh in 15 years: Spellbinding. Opening song on electric guitar, solitary at first, distortion filtered through a cloud of gauze. An evening of shuffling acoustics and plaintive ballads, odes to sadness, tear it all down. Later, a cappella alongside [...]

Vacations is an appropriate title for David Wechsler’s first foray into the landscape of the solo artist, a record that’s as focused on traveling as a metaphor for emotional journeys as musical ones. Over the course of 13 songs, departures and a travelogue of locations are masterfully utilized to illustrate the fragility of strained relationships and [...]

Originally published in Punk Planet May/June 2007 Knowing that this Tucson ensemble’s loyal following tend to break into fits of breathless poetry about desert horizons or sand-choked nights could lead the uninitiated to believe Joey Burns and John Convertino stepped fully formed out of some Arizona mirage one summer afternoon. Spoke, released before the incredible The Black [...]

Originally published in Punk Planet May/June 2007 This is a soundtrack less in the sense of Ennio Morricone, perhaps, than Rachel’s Systems/Layers or Gastr del Sol’s Harp Factory on Lake Street, where bridges create phantom-images and the space between the notes provides its own imagined narratives. You don’t need to see Bardo Hotel, the Tuxedomoon/George Kahanakis film [...]

Originally published in Punk Planet May/June 2007 It figures I’d find a record like this only after compiling all those obligatory year-ending top 10 lists. Where have these guys been hiding? This majestic seven-song EP is everything you could ask for from a young post-rock quintet and then some. The album-opening “We’ll Give Them Their Shoes Back [...]

Originally published in Punk Planet May/June 2007 The first track from this LA quintet’s debut might be the most deceiving introduction to a record you’ll hear this year. Held together with a canned sample of electronic percussion, the album-opening “I Just Need You” revolves around swirling electronics, soaring guitar leads, and studio-scrubbed vocal – precisely the sort [...]

Originally published in Punk Planet May/June 2007 The third record from this Portland trio aims for the stars but, ultimately, the whole package comes off more as a series of passing curiosities than a cohesifve collection of carefully crafted songs. That’s a shame, because these childhood friends clearly share an interesting musical language – one that blurs [...]

Originally published in Punk Planet March/April 2007 I was, admittedly, in grade school in 1986 when Buzz Osborne, Dale Crover and Matt Lukin drove from Washington to California to record their first full-length record. By the time I did hear it, some five or six years later, the group was being courted by the majors (thank you, [...]

Originally published in Punk Planet March/April 2007 This somewhat-anonymous act shows no love for boundaries on a 10-song outing that refuses to adhere to genre formulas or even the conventional borders of a CD track. Spare ambient asides bleed into soaring, Mogwai-inspired refrains before reverting to quiet, shimmering bits of pop rock. And none of this seems [...]