Created in the Image of Suffering is first and foremost a rock album and an album that invites you to get lost within its musical confines; to stop thinking, perhaps in order to release whatever demons have been shackled to your soul.
Sweet Baby Jesus put the soul back into Brooklyn's underground with songs that resonate upon a ramshackle jangle and a sure footed rock 'n' roll swagger.
With each release, Pile’s sound has twisted and turned this way or that, but always feeling like an arrival at something larger. On A Hairshirt of Purpose, Pile has culled from a palette of sounds and ideas that only they could have created.
"Lord of Garbage" welcomes you to "a world of filth, a world where dirty children run wild" before The Mad Doctors dive into a tornado riff and tight interlocked rhythms like the soundtrack to a brutal shark attack
Even though the songs on Below The House are more traditionally structured than his previous works, they are consuming in the same way. Slow, entrancing repetition paired with a complete emotional and sonic assault make this a powerful, unique record.
the song’s tension builds starting with heavy drums and a deep bass tone before a guitar solo erupts like Mount Vesuvius giving Spence permission to really let it rip with an impassioned vocal performance.
Bruised Fruit hits a good balance of reminiscing on Johnson’s older garage rock influenced sounds while also bringing a new lo-fi jangly feel to our ears.
The music video for “Breathing Thaw”- the closing track on Tim Woulfe’s latest EP The Thaw- was shot at Land’s End Park in San Francisco, taking advantage of the shore flooded with foam.
The quartet teamed up with local film collective, Good Day RVA, for a performance in Swannanoa Palace, a massive Italian Renaissance Villa built in 1912 in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. The room... well, it ain't too shabby.
Sometimes you need to escape completely, into something the opposite of how you’re feeling; for that, you should turn to Six Organs of Admittance’s newest, Burning the Threshold.
Originally recorded solo on the Fall Becomes Winter EP, "Half Step Back" is given new life as a full-band arrangement, a song as immediate as they come and inescapably endearing.
As the weather continues to warm, it’s believable that the album will continue to gain impact, comforting weary listeners as they spend time with loved ones, make small talk at odd barbecues, and contemplate whether they are making any progress at all in this weird life.
Just as the song comes together, so it comes apart, embracing devolution and collapsing at a whim, bending chords into oblivion and shifting rhythms without warning... and then right back together again.
On Pleasure Suck, Philadelphia five-piece Spirit of The Beehive create a noisy landscape that shape shifts at every turn. Sometimes hollow and sweet, sometimes brash and arresting- the album offers notes of the band's trademark sounds while welcoming something completely new.
On their new album, Opposites, singer Alyse Lamb doesn’t so much wear her heart on her sleeve so much as she does throw it on the floor in a blood-spattered mess, piecing it back together with a magnifying glass and a pair of tweezers.
The trio of Jazz Adam, Nina Ryser (Palberta) and Ricardo Balmaseda, play with the deconstructed, disoriented, and unpredictable nature of perception, contorting reality to its strangest form.
The band have come a long way since the release of Cherry Blossom, dipping their mopey sound into disorienting shoegaze and unwieldy slacker punk, creating a new record that is brilliantly weird and gloriously detached.
At what point does catering to the mainstream become an artist’s moral imperative? At what point does eschewing the attention of the masses undercut the artist’s credibility?
