Samiam have been around since the birth of time, big in Europe, and just happen to be one of my favorite bands ever. They did break up in 2001 after the release of Astray. However Samiam mainstays Jason Beebout and Sergie Loobkoff decided to get Samiam back together by finding some new members and put out their seventh album. Needless to say, I was stoked. Six years have passed since Samiam put out an album but their formula hasn't strayed from their well-beaten path of catchy hooks, driving melodic guitar riffs, and heavily repeated choruses. Samiam has always been noted as a pre-cursor to today's emo scene even though they were too grubby looking and balding to be considered cute. They were too punk in their ethics to be poster boys for the eternally sad hair in the eyes "Why Me? Generation." They just knew how to right a good song that knew where and when to pull the right heartstrings making their sound often duplicated but never perfected. Whatever's Got You Down is a good Samiam album, but not a great Samiam album. It's not as killer as Billy or Soar. It's not as catchy as Astray or Clumsy, … Read more
One of the things I love about reviewing is that sometimes I come across bands that are real gems that … Read more
Mark this down. This is the comeback record of the year for me. Planes Mistaken for Stars dropped the ball … Read more
I was able to listen to Untitled II on my way up to visit friends at James Madison University, about … Read more
With poverty becoming a fashion statement (I'm sure some Vice or Pitchfork contributor has ditched the birth-control glasses and bangover … Read more
I'm sure there are a lot of kids out there who refuse to move on and listen to the bands … Read more
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American Football are the sort of band that shouldn't have attracted so much attention. When they first properly emerged in 1999, a copy of their eponymous debut in hand, they were still playing small college bars around the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Their album cover was so low-key it should have been unremarkable, depicting the darkened exterior of a house somewhere in the Midwest, while a bright light illuminated one oblong window. It seemed both voyeuristic and distant, but offered a strange familiarity. They broke up soon after their debut came out, and in any other case the band probably should've faded into irrelevancy. Instead, after American Football disbanded, their fanbase continued to swell and their album became a seminal portrait of late '90s emo, before the subculture came … Read more
Easter, the second and highly anticipated full-length from These Arms Are Snakes, is finally upon us. But just how anticipated was this album? Well it is no coincidence that the album leaked to the Internet three months prior to its official release date. It's also no coincidence that every review that I've read has been written by a journalist smitten … Read more
The Blood Brothers are one of those bands that can get you into shit with people. Not that anyone should have to appease anyone else with his or her musical interests and fancies. But, lets be honest, there is a very pronounced dividing line between people who enjoy The Blood Brothers and people who detest them. One reason for such … Read more
If you ate nothing but the guts of ravens, the shells of beetles, and the wax from vinyl, your shit might slide down your pants dense and black as night. Assuming shit doesn't have the connation of something bad, this soulless turd sums up Xasthur's newest full-length, Subliminal Genocide, in how it sounds, the way it makes you feel, and … Read more
By now, you've probably already heard Hidden World. It leaked months ago, and the band even posted a link to one of its downloading proxies on their blog. Before long the Internet was awash in reactions, most grouped along two polarities - while plenty of listeners thought they were hearing something important, just as many others lamented that "the drums … Read more
Have The Mars Volta finally become predictable? Were they already? Are they still churning out jaw-droppingly unexpected music? Did they ever? All these questions and more probably won't be answered in this review. Amputechture, the fairly quickly-released third full-length from the El Paso, Texas group, is in some ways a sequel to 2005's Frances the Mute, but still retains some … Read more
Phillip Roebuck will never be explained in writing. Writing does no justice to what Phillip Roebuck does. He plays a banjo at breakneck speed. He is a one-man band that bashes away at a bass drum and tambourine on his back. See, it just doesn't sound right, does it? It conjures images of Groundskeeper Willy yelling, "I'm a maniac, MANIAC!" … Read more
Of all of the promos in the pile in the corner of my room, Weapons are Useless has been languishing there the longest, festering silently, crying out to be reviewed. From time to time I would pop the disk into my laptop, in a vain attempt to make something of what Your Eyes My Dreams had dumped upon me. It … Read more
A lot of bands get labeled as "angry" or "pissed off" as a result of their lyrical content, and I'm sure you could apply those same adjectives to Know the Score. However, I feel that doing so would be doing a great disservice to them, not to mention those descriptions are rather played out. I feel a better way to … Read more
It seems strange that a band like Eyes Averted would end up having to self-release their debut album. Before Paralyzing Passion and Motion was completed, the band was abruptly dropped from their label. Why would this happen? What acceptable excuse could there possibly be? The technical, almost progressive, hardcore style the band embraces has reached a level of popularity that … Read more
As tragic as it was, the death of founding member and guitarist Dennis "Piggy" D'Amour in 2005 was not the death of Voivod. The final nail in the coffin was hammered with the departure of Jean-Yves "Blacky" Thériault fifteen years ago. Although songwriting and arrangements were always credited to the band as a whole, the void left in the overall … Read more
In this day and age, it seems to take way more effort than it should to get a new band's name out there. There are so many ways people can check out a new band, not to mention it's so much easier than it has been in the past. It used to be that you had to release a song … Read more
It seems that in the current day and age the process of starting a hardcore band has become an act of great ease as compared to, oh let's say, five years ago. Listen close to the first ten Revelation releases, rip off the riffs and place them just right, (don't forget your dive-bombs!) grab all your friends together to record … Read more
Oh the joys of a local band starting to make it big! I've been a friend of two members of Jefferson Third since I was a freshman in high school. It was only a matter of time before the two of them started a band. And when one of them was randomly assigned a college roommate and they started jamming … Read more
So, my brother calls me out of the blue one day and excitedly explains to me that he has discovered the most "amazing" singer-songwriter that he has heard in ages. I was skeptical, as he usually likes the absolute worst music imaginable within the punk, hardcore, and indie genres. Thus I returned his enthusiasm for this newfound artist, Micah P. … Read more
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