Tag: alt-rock
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Throttlerod – Turncoat
These Virginia veterans and Small Stone mainstays have just put out their first album in almost seven years. Turncoat is album number five from this heavy-rock outfit, and their fourth for the Detroit label, to which they’ve been signed almost since the turn of the century. (They have the distinction of covering “Black Betty” on…
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The Flaming Lips – Heady Nuggs, 1994-1997: 20 Years After Clouds Taste Metallic
As most fans know, The Flaming Lips had already gone through a few semi-seamless transitions by the time they were ready to begin making Clouds Taste Metallic. By then, they’d already been DIY Okie punks and goth-y pseudo rockers, and had even managed to sort of put together an arresting estimation of their first genuinely…
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Dilly Dally – Sore
In this age of computer-generated musical perfection, it’s refreshing to hear Sore – Dilly Dally‘s debut album. For the first time in what feels like forever, listeners are confronted by a female-fronted (both on vocals and guitar) outfit who is unafraid to have (and bare) some teeth and anger without trying to be cute about…
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Eels – Shootenanny! LP
After Souljacker was released, nothing was ever quite the same again for the Eels. Part of it must have felt fantastic because the band really thrived; it was as though Souljacker blew open a floodgate which spontaneously made new sounds, experiments with different moods, vibes and ideas fair game to explore. Liberated, Mark Everett threw…
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Eels – Souljacker
…And then, for their fourth LP, Eels would offer their fans something completely different. Before this point in their catalogue, the band has remained fairly passive and artful in their compositions as well as in the presentations of them (it was all very alt-) but, on Souljacker, the band takes a much more forceful and…
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Eels – Electro-Shock Blues 2LP
It may have occurred by accident or it may have happened by design but, regardless, few alt-rock albums made in the late Nineties (a.k.a. the peak of the compact disc’s reign as the recorded music format of choice) were so ideally suited to being pressed on vinyl as Eels‘ Electro-Shock Blues. The pacing of the…
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Foo Fighters – s/t LP (reissue)
It feels strange to be discussing the twentieth anniversary of Foo Fighters‘ debut album now – just months after Universal Music Enterprises celebrated the same anniversary for the release of Nirvana’s In Utero album. It seems weird because, while the original releases of those albums were only twenty-two months apart, they feel as though they…
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Gateway Drugs – Magick Spells LP (vinyl review)
The idea that a change of something as seemingly inconsequential as the format on which an album is presented (be it CD, cassette, vinyl record or mp3) can change the listening experience completely may seem unbelievable, but that does not mean it isn’t true and cannot happen. Of course the medium (format) that one is…
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Kinski – 7 (Or 8)
Without intending to sound condescending, things are really starting to get interesting for Kinski now – on their seventh full-length album. For the sake of context, Kinski willfully challenged themselves a couple of years ago when the (long thought to be) instrumental band released Cosy Moments, an album which defied convention because it featured lyric sheets…
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Scott Weiland and The Wildabouts – Blaster
Love him or hate him, no one can claim that Scott Weiland isn’t adaptable. Since first appearing on the alt-rock radar with Stone Temple Pilots in 1993, the singer has changed his artistic focus with the same kind of regularity that most people have in changing their socks; he rolled through a series of compositional…