Bear Hands first made waves in 2007 with the release of its first record Golden EP, bolstered by a nervy energy and politically pointed lyrics on songs like “Vietnam.” On the Brooklyn band’s latest release, Burning Bush Supper Club, Dylan Rau’s incisive lyrics are very much intact, but the band…
When Johnny Wohlfahrt announced in private that he would play the new open mike night at Starbucks, it seemed incredibly absurd. Open mike is almost always either for poets trying out new material or for singer-songwriters testing the waters after years of writing out of the public eye. Open mikes…
As two-thirds of renowned noise-punk band Wives, Dean Spunt and Randy Randall not only made some of the most adventurous and blistering rock music of the last decade, but they helped put long-running L.A. DIY space the Smell on the map as a locus for innovative and exciting music, West…
Like the album’s name itself, all of the song titles on Ishmael Asimov fall just shy of cringeworthy puns and curious statements. In fact, one has to applaud the audacity of calling a song “Slap N’ Pickle” and have it be a rather contemplative number. But mostly this release is…
Early in its career, Blonde Redhead clearly drew inspiration from DNA, whose song was the inspiration for the band’s name. But instead of solely offering up atonal squalls and musical deconstruction, Blonde Redhead’s songwriting also flirted with haunted melodies. By the time of 2004’s Misery Is a Butterfly, what would…
It turns out that Nederland should be known for more than just its tranquil gentility and Grandpa Bredo and his Tuff Shed. Elephant Revival (due at the Walnut Room on Friday, November 26) does the unlikely by taking bluegrass-inflected Americana and making it seem more fresh than old-timey. The outfit…
TJUTJUNA Woodsman • Married In Berdichev • DJ Peter Black 11.19.10 | Larimer Lounge For his set, Peter Black used an iPad to control and trigger some of the sounds he was weaving into his live remixes. This set of songs had kind of a raw, percussion heavy sound and…
This debut full-length is a collection of fairly straightforward Americana songs — that is, if your idea of straightforward Americana songs involves running into the Devil on the roads of the high plains. “Ballad From Below” embodies the half-acoustic, half-electric sound most of these tunes use as they explore the…
Recalling the work of Donald Fagen or Jason Mraz, this band’s eclectic oeuvre is undergirded by jazz and R&B rhythms, with a bit of hip-hop thrown into the vocal melody here and there. And while initially Petals of Spain (due at the Larimer Lounge on Saturday, November 20) could be…
SMALL BLACK With Class Actress • Pictureplane • Vitamins 11.13.10 | Rhinoceropolis This was a grittier than ever version of Vitamins. On the first song, it was obvious that someone had triggered a sample or a loop or something generating electronic sounds behind the band. Either way, it filled in…
DANZIG With Withered • Toxic Holocaust • Marduk • Possessed 11.12.10 | Ogden Theatre Atlanta’s Withered set the stage for much of what was to follow with its admixture of death metal and grindcore. But instead of playing with lightning speed, this band seemed to care more about mood and…
Formed in 2009, Weekend started out as a trio comprised of guys from punk and hardcore bands in the Bay Area who wanted to do something with a broader sonic palette. Often compared to My Bloody Valentine and The Jesus & Mary Chain, Weekend doesn’t really sound like either so…
Small Black’s debut EP definitely harks back to those great synth-pop songs of the early ’80s with its vintage sound, but with a kind of lo-fi production more in line with a later era in music. The strong songwriting and a keen sense of pacing and melody continued into the…
For more than fifteen years, Ian O’Dougherty was in Uphollow. Early on, Uphollow was something of a melodic punk-rock band, but by the late ’90s, it had evolved into an act that included a lot more nuance and conscious craft in its songwriting. Around the turn of last decade, Ian…
“Pleroma” sounds like a collage take on IDM, post-rock and dream pop, like if Geogaddi-era Boards of Canada blended together bits of sound ideas from Sigur Rós and Radiohead. On Redefinition, Dan Barnett has crafted a melancholy yet expansive set of music that suggests night travel by air over an…
Black Magicians From the Mountains of Mars is a bit of a mouthful. And an eyeful, for that matter. And while not everyone from that band migrated over to Skully Mammoth, the colossal sound sure did. Someone reaching for a genre descriptor for the kind of music made by these…
The Noid isn’t just that pesky pizza-chilling character from old Domino’s commercials from the ’80s. It’s a region of England from which the neo-soul garage-rock band known as the Heavy hails. Fronted by the charismatic Kelvin Swaby, the band came together in its current form as a quartet when Swaby…
In this week’s issue, the Rough Mixes entry focusing on Eolian, the progressive-rock project led by Ian O’Dougherty (Uphollow, Ian Cooke, TaunTaun) and featuring occasional Backbeat contributor Sean Merrell (tintin, Ian Cooke, A Shoreline Dream) and Adam Edwards (A Shoreline Dream), barely scratched the surface of our recent conversation with…
Supposedly started as a joke band of sorts, Arsonists Get All the Girls became more popular than its members’ more serious projects. A sampling of songs from the group’s catalogue doesn’t make the joke immediately obvious, because these guys sound like a serious death-metal band, with electronic sounds stitching everything…
Before he spent time in a cabin on Long Island writing what would become the debut EP by Small Black, Josh Kolenik was in a rock band called Slowlands that played around New York to some acclaim. But when Kolenik moved on to writing his synth-centric material as Small Black,…
Several blocks outside the First Friday art-walk on Santa Fe sits Illiterate Gallery at 72 South Broadway. It’s a part of town that some consider a place so-called “hipsters” call home — but if you stand in front of Illiterate too long on any other night of the week, you’re…
YODA’S HOUSE With Married in Berdichev • Hot White • Hideous Men 11.06.10 | Rhinoceropolis Things got started fashionably late at Rhino with Married in Berdichev. The first song sounded for all the world like a Brittany Gould original, with all the gorgeously lush and delicately textured grandeur enveloping you…
