Archive

Suburban Kansas City doesn’t present itself as a typical breeding ground for aspiring hip-hop artists, but Mac Lethal (real name: David McCleary Sheldon) is far from your typical rapper. After a notable appearance at the annual Scribble…

At the turn of the millennium, there was only so much you could do with shoegazer, the “wall of sound.” A genre that relied heavily on effects such as distortion, loads of delay, synths and most of…

I’ve done studies here and there, both through high school courses and nerdy self-teachings, on many of the wonderful movies, cartoons, comics, and games that come out of Japan. Throughout these studies I have been completely dumbstruck…

Orion Rigel Dommisse’s debut What I Want From You Is Sweet creates music that sounds like the Victorian era’s vision of the future, yet twisted through H.G. Well’s rusted time travel concepts. Though lyrically doomed, the beguiling…

It seems like everyone between the ages of 13 and 21 got a flannel shirt for Christmas in 1994. Seattle music was blowing up. Marketers, industry executives, and other suits struggled to contextualize what was happening in…

There’s something about a concept album that begs for a time travel/alien/sci-fi theme. Think David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders From Mars or The Flaming Lips’ Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots.…

The fragile vocals seem to complement the acoustic guitar really well. This hasn’t changed since the idea first surfaced. Sure, the type of music played has changed. Blues and Tin Pan Alley aren’t the booming successes they…

A quick follow up to their self-titled debut LP, The Bird and the Bee’s five-song EP, Please Clap Your Hands is a charming, sometimes surprisingly potent effort. While making no bones in their attempt to be the…

I’ve now discovered what would happen if the lead singers of The Fray, Leeland and the Goo Goo Dolls mashed their talents together to make one voice: it would be that of the Alternate Routes’ Tim Warren.…

In the eager attentiveness of the first few weeks after its release, a friend commented that Animal Collective’s LP, Strawberry Jam, sounded “tribal – the rhythms and vocal shenanigans.” “It sounds like childhood,” I said. “But it’s…