The story of Milwaukee’s Jaill sounds like it was ripped straight out of a screenplay for the indie hit of the year: Vincent Kircher and Austin Dutmer realize they’re getting older and decide to finally get serious about their part-time band they started seven years ago which had, until then, only amounted to losing bass [...]

How did every morsel on Happy Birthday’s debut LP become as memorable as a first-slow-dance song? How did a first listen to the album feel like a 60th time through one of our old favorites? “Eyes Music,” with its upside-down rhythms and staircase harmonies marching across your face like martians. “Subliminal Message,” the ballad that [...]

The Vaselines deserve some major credit for sticking to their guns. It’s been 20 years since the band’s last, first, and only full-length album, Dum-Dum. Thankfully, the Scottish duo’s latest effort, Sex With An X, picks up exactly where that left off.
The album’s sound is early-‘90s alternative rock; the kind of stuff that influenced Nirvana [...]

Formed in Glasgow in 1987, The Vaselines released two singles and one album, Dum Dum, on the 53rd & 3rd label. Splitting up in 1989 (in the same week their album was released), they might have faded into obscurity but for the intervention of a certain band from Seattle. Nirvana covered three Vaselines songs, helping to fuel a growing after-the-fact [...]

The British band Foals’ debut record Antidotes was called a “special album,” so it’s no surprise that this second release surely follows suit.  Like Local Natives and Vampire Weekend, these chaps really dig their David Byrne — the impressively funky title track would fit right in on Talking Heads ’77. The danceable opener “Blue Blood”, [...]

Singer-guitarist Mat Brooke had big plans for Grand Archives’ sophomore album. The band had written a slew of new songs, and honed them during sound checks around the world. They were good to go. And when they entered the studio and the tapes started rolling?
“It sounded kind of… Like guys who don’t really play rock [...]

Every so often over the past few years you’d hear a whisper about this new Brooklyn band featuring a couple of indie rock veterans. Supposedly they’d been practicing since 2006, but weren’t ready to play live yet. Then they finally did play and immediately a bootleg recording of that first show spread all over the [...]

Vincent Kircher, Austin Dutmer, Andrew Harris, and Ryan Adams are a somewhat sneaky, rarely sleazy group of guys from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Together, they are Jaill, a self-described psych-pop combo who play with undeniable guts. Jaill rocks enough to let the guys feel tough and still make the girls shake their asses till there’s sweat on [...]

For a band that played so softly, Carissa’s Wierd generated a hell of a buzz. “We never intended to be as quiet as we were,” says co-founder Jenn Ghetto. The hushed volumes that became a stylistic trademark were one of the earliest outcomes of that WTF attitude. As teenagers in Tucson, AZ, Ghetto and Mat [...]

Described by the band as “an almost live representation of the Lou Barlow + the missingmen live show,” the band’s new digital EP = Sentridoh III (Merge Records) is another step forward for Lou Barlow, and his first release with new backing band the missingmen (guitarist Tom Watson and drummer Raul Morales). With new cuts, rocking [...]

From the first beat of Expo 86, Wolf Parade wastes no time jumping headfirst into the high-energy sonic explosion of their third full-length album. Named after Wolf Parade’s initial meeting place at the World’s Fair of 1986 in Vancouver, Expo 86 gives listeners a rare blend of danceable hard-rocking tracks that are neither the least [...]

The Hipster Invasion is nigh on the horizon. What began as the subtle higher worth of skinny jeans has become a full blown counterculture of the 21st century — it has its own language, its own fashion, and, yes, it has its own music. Among which, Male Bonding’s new record, Nothing Hurts, may find itself [...]

Marking another notch in the lineage of American folk music, Blitzen Trapper continues to serve as an all-too-modern history lesson on their fifth album, Destroyer of the Void. Taking pages from folk, classic rock, and modern indie rock, Blitzen Trapper doesn’t lose a step from 2008’s Furr, the album that put them on my (and [...]

CocoRosie is an eclectic sister act with pop and sizzle. Put simply, they’re in the business of entertainment, and with the incorporation of nearly every style of popular music, Grey Oceans is an interesting take on mass appeal. There’s everything from modern jazz, hip-hop, pop-rock, and sweet childlike wonder packed into this piece of new [...]

From its foundation as a Puritan colony in 1630, to the ban on William S. Burroughs’ groundbreaking Naked Lunch during the free-wheeling ‘60s, Boston has a long, proud tradition of suppressing freedom of expression. Yet it has also nurtured some of our nation’s most provocative individuals: Donna Summer, the Pixies, Edgar Allen Poe, Ralph Waldo [...]