Search Results for "Jason Reeher"

Ever since kids with guitars first discovered that the family garage had use beyond holding the old man’s sedan, the racket that has so often emanated from them is considered the epitome of primitiveness. Merely deeming a band’s sound “garage rock” effectively chains it to a state of perpetual primordiality, welcome or otherwise. But over…

Perfectionists haven’t had it easy in the indie-rock era — just ask Billy Corgan, the much-maligned, megalomaniacal leader of Smashing Pumpkins. In a lo-fi age, Corgan feels limited by a 72-track mixing board; from a world bounded by platinum-selling regular joes and fundamentalists who coin label names like Kill Rock Stars, he seeks old-school rock…

Platitudes about flattery don’t go very far in justifying Bush’s unnatural attachment to the fabulous sounds of the Pacific Northwest. On Sixteen Stone, the thunderous English quartet displays the manipulative skill of bionic engineers, playing stylistic charades in a gene pool stocked with the sounds of Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains and Mudhoney.…

If you’ve ever wondered what it takes to set West Coast indie kids’ hearts aflutter, the ingredients include equal parts emo(tive) singing/shouting and a Built to Spill sense for congenial musical atmosphere over pop succinctness. Washington state’s Modest Mouse takes an oblique approach towards communicating the most direct of feelings, letting songs dip far away…

It’s usually safe as milk to assume that bands who make splashy entrances — as England’s Radiohead did, with a gimmicky self-deprecating US debut (“Creep”) that slyly “fuck”ed its way up the charts — have no place to go but down. That makes the enormous creative growth between Pablo Honey and The Bends all the…

Having made one great album and one dreadful one, Britain’s Alabama 3 (who are known in the US as A3 thanks to a dispute with the state-named country group) were all but forgotten until being discovered by The Sopranos. The rest, as they say, would have been history, only the band couldn’t capitalize on that…

Massachusetts-bred Jedediah Smith leads My Teenage Stride, an ’80s cover band that performs its own songs. MTS variously apes the Smiths, Go-Betweens, New Order and a dozen other new wave luminaries, performing originals that are often terrific and not altogether derivative. The diverse A Sad Cloud veers from Jam-inspired bounce (“Blackbeard’s Ghost”) to faux-gospel balladry…

Throw Me the Statue is the one-man-band name of Seattle’s Scott Reitherman, who makes sweet, slightly goofy lo-fi pop taking the archetype of Guided by Voices and replacing the irony with tweeness. Moonbeams is outstanding. Assisted by Pedro the Lion bassist/percussionist Casey Foubert, Reitherman finds a middle ground between Bob Pollard and Belle and Sebastian.…

The Black Angels’ obvious reference point is the Velvet Underground. The Austin band, which traffics in dark, droning psychedelia, is named for a VU title. They perform the occasional death song and even have a female drummer. But it’s still a deficient and lazy comparison. There are all kinds of ways to drone darkly, and…

Ah, expectations. They can damn a promising young rock band faster than you can say “his famous father.” Yet, the Wallflowers, with reluctant leader Jakob (son of Bob) Dylan enjoyed a measure of success in the mid-1990s. Along with Hootie and the Blowfish and the Gin Blossoms, the ‘Flowers led the way for a pop-conscious…

Because he is better known from usually inferior cover versions of his songs (Judy Collins’ “Suzanne” being the blandest), Montreal’s Leonard Cohen (who died in November 2016) was frequently taken for a singer/songwriter in a sullen variation on the James Taylor sensitive mold. But this world-weary, ironic commentator on romantic despair had more in common…

The debut album by the brashest brats Britain has produced in a decade sloshes cocky rock-star attitude all over sensually loud rhythm-guitar pop, one-upping elders like Stone Roses and the Jesus and Mary Chain by swiping their best features and adding a heavy dose of unfashionable Beatles worship. Landing squarely in familiar post-punk mud, the…

Talk about a change-up… Anybody who bought into the muscular popcraft of Sponge would probably blanch at an earful of its predecessor. Loudhouse was a short-lived Detroit band that tried to patch together the city’s vibrant techno scene and the hard-rock heritage established in nearby Ann Arbor by the MC5 and the Stooges. The quartet’s…

Between the increasingly smug, ironic stance of most post-modern entertainment and the generally diminished expectations of a generation resigned to also-ran status, it’s somewhat surprising that a band like this quartet from York, Pennsylvania, materialized at all, much less took up residence for a time at the apex of the pop charts. With an affinity…

Following the bizarre 1980 death of Ian Curtis and the remarkable success of “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” guitarist/singer Bernard Sumner and the two other remaining members of Joy Division transmuted into New Order, adding guitar/synth player Gillian Gilbert before recording Movement. Proceeding from a projected creative future of Joy Division, New Order sold million…

After Australia’s chaos-wreaking Birthday Party immolated in the early ’80s, singer Nick Cave set out to develop his bleak, twisted ideas about American country music, spiritual music and Delta blues. Backed by the Bad Seeds — featuring bassist Barry Adamson (ex-Magazine), guitarist Blixa Bargeld (moonlighting from Einstürzende Neubauten) and drummer Mick Harvey (the Birthday Party’s…