Those who blinked in early 2003 missed the rapid ascent of the Exploding Hearts, a Portland, Oregon punk quartet that earned heaps of well-deserved accolades in merely a few months for crafting a sound cribbed from dozens of rock ‘n’ roll’s two-minute masterpieces. Each song on the band’s one and only album sounds immediately familiar,…
It’s always nice to find punks with a sense of humor. Although AOD didn’t exactly blast off with Let’s Barbeque — six songs on seven inches recorded in 15 minutes — these New Jersey natives grew into a far better band. The first record’s sound is barrel-bottom, but the playing has a nice industrial buzz;…
Bands whose only distinguishing feature is a singer who sounds like Johnny Rotten with a bad cold usually don’t make much of an impression, but the Pattern’s soulful rock riffage and short, tightly constructed songs leave little time for boredom or the sense that you’ve heard this all before. Singer/Lookout! Records CEO Chris Appelgren’s voice…
Deadguy’s influence on the modern hardcore and metal scenes dwarfs its scant notoriety, despite recording one of the most powerful metal records of the ‘90s. Channeled through the spirits of Unsane, Black Flag and Today Is the Day, Deadguy’s screaming sheets of oppressive guitar noise and larynx-shredding vocals in turn guided some of today’s loudest…
Sweet Baby was among the first East Bay/Gilman Street punk bands to be picked up by an established record label — five years before Green Day dookied on the Reprise roster — and paid the typical price for such ground-breaking. Said label consigned an incredibly catchy, joyful record to undue obscurity. Singer Dallas Denery and…
As sensitive, precious rock bands go, Track Star is a cut above the usual collection of mopey boys with degrees from the Woe-Is-Me Finishing School. Matthew Troy and Wyatt Cusick, who share guitar and vocal duties, write catchy songs that seldom delve into the fey pretentiousness that afflicts so many of their brethren; the duo’s…
Unlikely rock veterans by their 20s, the Donnas — together since junior high school — went through three band names before emerging on the national scene; they then struggled to shed the perception that a man pulled their creative strings. The Palo Alto, California, quartet — guitarist Alison “Donna R.” Robertson, vocalist Brett “Donna A.”…
Minneapolis’ Suicide Commandos were a pre-hardcore punk trio with a big local following. Signed in 1977 (along with Pere Ubu) to Phonogram’s short-lived but prescient Amerindie subsidiary, Blank, they proved that New York wasn’t the only launching site for new wave groups, and helped further the notion that records need not sound like Pink Floyd…
Imagine the smelly kid who spent seventh grade with his hand down his pants, saved his boogers in a jar and told girls in a deadly serious tone that he was going to get them pregnant. Now imagine four of those kids in a band. Sockeye came farting and ejaculating out of Kent, Ohio, in…
Amy Linton can thank her mother’s record collection — dominated by ’60s girl groups — for the unique sound of Aislers Set. The backbone supporting the obvious Zombies, early Who and Byrds (plus Jesus and Mary Chain) influences is a bargain basement Phil Spector sound, with familiar Shangri-Las backbeats, a liberal dose of reverb, a…
These Seattle new wave revivalists (not the late ’70s Boston rock band or the late ’90s Chicago punk trio) sound more like an ’80s also-ran than the worthy bands they ape: mostly Devo, Missing Persons and the Cars. Singer Shannon Brown seems to want very badly to be Richard Hell, and keyboardist Eric Nordlund tries…
Kool Keith is perhaps rap’s most genuinely weird character. Since co-founding the seminal rap outfit Ultramagnetic MC’s in the Bronx in 1984, his rhymes and music, never quite at peace with the hip-hop mainstream, have grown progressively more strange, disturbing and adventurous. He’s the creator of more than a dozen personas, including a cannibalistic doctor,…
Solitary, nerdy white boys fond of ’60s psychedelic rock — like, for instance, Boston native Edan Portnoy — are scarcely prime candidates for a future in rap music. But Portnoy, inspired by hip-hop on one hand and the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix on the other, has crafted a childlike but compelling emcee persona. Unabashedly old…
From the dinkiest punks to the soggy dregs at the bottom of the ’60s garage rock barrel, so many deservedly obscure bands have been compiled and reissued over the years that it’s dismaying to find a band as good as the Mice unknown and overlooked for nearly two decades after the fact. Despite being heard…
Prolific to a fault, involved in a dizzying array of side projects and the leader of a long-lived rock group with a rotating membership and a penchant for low-fidelity recordings, Stewart Anderson might lazily be taken for an English Robert Pollard. However, Anderson’s brand of noisy, slapdash guitar pop is more Wedding Present than Who…
This Swedish quintet isn’t the second coming of anything; they’re the third and fourth comings of the B-52s, Gang of Four, X-Ray Spex, Roxy Music, Kleenex and Adam and the Ants, with a gauzy, cavernous sound that swirls it all into an appealing, energetic new wave puree. Love Is All swipes so many snatches of…
At first, (Young) Pioneers lyrics sound like half-baked sloganeering, with superfluous nods to radical heroes like George Jackson and Carlos the Jackal. Their best songs, however, describe the relationship between struggling individuals and the machinery of oppressive politics — images of lovers in a riot or a Vietnam veteran writing to his wife about his…
Greasy R&B, early rock and roll, ’70s punk and garage rock of all vintages drive the Konks’ raw, wild debut, which chokes maximum energy from a familiar lo-fi bash-and-roll format. Innovative? Nope, but that hardly matters as these blues-based stompers, informed by Hasil Adkins and the Sex Pistols, are savaged by the trio of ex-Coffin…
If at times it seems rock’n’roll has become little more than a big money-sucking organism, this Seattle quartet has managed to get pretty far fueled on nothing but cheap equipment and cheap pot. Splitting the difference between metallic thud and garage fuzz, Love Battery ambled straight down the double yellow line that divided the two…
Like the dirt-smudged, bratty neighbor kid who becomes a surprisingly cool and self-assured adult, Kent 3 transformed themselves in a mere two years from a mediocre garage band into a powerful, unique rock outfit with an indelible sound. Before maturing, however, Kent 3 made the erratic Screaming Youth Fantastic. The album shows promise — “The…
