Reviewed by Eric Saeger Your upgrade from math-jazz-punk like this would involve buying bands like That Fucking Tank, but I suppose the utterly deconstructed sounds of real-live Brooklyn Knitting Factory avant-jazz kids will float enough people’s boats, sure. This crew is sax and stun-guitar over bass-drums, so you get Red Scare into Bosstones-ska bang on […]

Reviewed by Eric Saeger I’ve said it before, but it does continue to be the case that one can almost never go wrong buying jazz albums for their cover art. Simple, streamlined, a wee bit old school while keeping one eye on an increasingly cybernetic world, the art and music itself evoke Weather Report in […]

Reviewed by Eric Saeger I’m all for a little diversity, and multi-lingual chill-folk singer Gaby Moreno has enough eclectic interests that her constant gear-switching is coherent, at least to overeducated NPR liberals. Basically this is ripe for soundtracking a snobby coming-of-age-again-for-the-5th-time Baby Boomer movie, music that’s slow, flabby, and randomly old-sounding, in other words annoying […]

Reviewed by Eric Saeger Sweden isn’t particularly famous for glam rock, not that those weird little frozen micro-countries in Europe won’t try anything for a laugh. So we have the band Sister, which I’m sure will never eventually run into any trademark name litigation ever, and they bill themselves as glammy sleaze-rock. Such it is, […]

Reviewed by Eric Saeger Half the time, Boston-based Dear Hunter bandleader Casey Crescenzo has a voice that sounds like Julian Casablancas out of a pull-top can, but he can also do a passable Brandon Flowers. Given this, there’s obvious potential for making a permanent mark in show biz, at least for the next 15 minutes […]

Reviewed by Eric Saeger It’s probably quite fitting that this was the first album I listened to for review purposes in 2011, a year that promises more long-term unemployment and a brand spanking new Wall Street-driven oil bubble (to end with a ‘shocking’ stock crash, be assured), meaning lots more destroyed people. Of this double […]

Reviewed by Eric Saeger This jazz setup, led up by Munich-born violinist Natalia Brunke, could have been conducive to some exquisite creativity. Could have been. The major fail here is singer Marina Trost, whose workaday voice is as interchangeable as a muffler in a 1998 Buick, a warning from the get-go that there will be […]

Reviewed by Eric Saeger In a perfect, not-so-genre-gerrymandered 80s-revival world, this band would tour with goth-darlings Birthday Massacre, the bright keyboards and autumnal first-day-of-high-school angst of both bands duking it out for retro-supremacy. But as I alluded to, Denver’s Chain Gang of 1974 are more straightforward and less kitschy in their Talk Talk worship, which, […]

Reviewed by Eric Saeger Campfire-ready bedroom-pop strummed and crooned by hipster-fringe-pandering Alessio Natalizia, who dazzled the Pitchfork-arazzi with his distortion-washed previous ‘single’ ‘Upside Down’. Aside from possessing a gift for hook (catchy music is back in fashion now?), Natalizia glugs down the usual Kool-Aid, wallowing too long in a pool of nonsensical psyche-chill repetition at […]

Reviewed by Eric Saeger Downtrodden hoodie-honky chill-rap of the quality familiar to Rhymesayers repeat customers. The Seattle-based 27-year-old isn’t in either the physical or lyrical weight class to fight his way through these ghetto survival issues, but he’s elegantly eloquent about them, curling his squishy-soft baritone around ‘Falling From You’ when it’s time to get […]

Reviewed by Eric Saeger First album in eight years for the 43-year-old folkie, who became a more prominent strand of the genre’s fibre upon her production and song-slot on the O Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack. We’re looking at a step back in her progression after her getting stuck in an empty void of music […]

Reviewed by Eric Saeger With the help of an against-the-Nashville-grain producer (Neilson Hubbard), this Kentucky five-some are, as advertised, new-and-improved relative to their first LP Yellow Tag Mondays. Obvious clean-teens, the record purports to be an homage to their parents’ generation of 60s/70s music. But this sort of uppity bluegrass is more native to Mumford […]

Reviewed by Eric Saeger San Antonio’s response to Freezepop, Hyperbubble are possessed of a fetish for retro-80s synthpop, which, as a dead art, requires mass tonnage of hype to get any traction. Being from the tech mecca of Boston, Freezepop has always had the advantage, nowadays thriving in their design/video-game day-gigs while Hyperbubble does God […]

Reviewed by Eric Saeger Chop-screwed drum’n’bass for metalheads. Johnny Love was half of Guns N’ Bombs and is now all of Deathface, aside from a few random screeches from psycho-posturing chick singer Adri Law on ‘Sick of It’. ‘Gift of Fury’ is desolate and hard-ass at turns, what you’d expect if Acumen Nation tried their […]

Reviewed by Eric Saeger This smarmy experimental effort sews together patches of swamp-goth, gloom-prog, chamber-pop and baroque, covers it with un-pro, barely tolerable Ben Gibbard-influenced vocals that make it seem a lot less earnest an effort than it may be, and sort of wanders around like a stoned college kid at a jock bar trying […]

Reviewed by Eric Saeger Expanded version of of the Sony-propelled release from the melodic-nu-metal crew, who’ve opened for Judas Priest and whatnot in their native Phoenix. Like so many Metal Blade-level non-thrashers, there are tales of brushes with near-fame along their journey, in this case one of the guys touring as second-banana guitarist on such-and-so-guy-from-Mastodon’s […]

Reviewed by Eric Saeger The endless dichotomy in the goth-metal world continues, with most bands (are we still supposed to call one-man and two-man operations “bands”?) offering catchy but disposable tunes and the rest sacrificing melody at the altar of whiz-bang android noise. This Italian duo leans more toward the latter, even if their next-gen […]

Reviewed by Eric Saeger One can always count on Australians to deliver camp with their serious-ass whatever-they’re-doing, in this case a Savatage-meets-Bathory take on death-extreme metal. In normal human talk, that means cutesy exorcist-shriek vocals over nods to early Misfits by way of Anthrax, but what makes this so Australian is the no-budget production, a […]

Reviewed by Eric Saeger The words “Sweden” and “metal” in the same sentence of a review usually indicate speed, Beelzebub, white makeup, that kind of thing. Even worse, sometimes it means the band standing trial is a bunch of simpletons who have a fave Priest/Maiden tune they hope people have forgotten about and they’re shoving […]

Reviewed by Eric Saeger Caveat emptor if you’re looking for a primer on the steampunk genre; this is actually a mildly experimental jazz quartet. I was drawn more to this by the promise of some modicum of electro (from the laptop of most-of-the-time bassist Rene Hart), however the bulk of this, to further shy away […]

Reviewed by Eric Saeger “Survival is the new American dream,” sings Larson on ‘Own to Rent’, the bummed-down rocker that opens this LP, and even the most ADD-afflicted cynic has to stop in the face of it. An asphalt worker in a past life and formerly of Irish band The Drovers, Larson does know first-hand […]

Reviewed by Eric Saeger Zero 7-style chill in unrequited search of a hook. Part-time Decemberist Petra Haden and her violin have experimented with a lot of things, perhaps too many; after hearing this – which should have been titled ‘Variations on Girl From Ipanema For Overeducated Soccer Moms’ – I can state without reservation that […]

Reviewed by Eric Saeger Usually the arrival of a CD from a white chick jazz singer with actress-level good looks elicits expectations of not much whatsoever, and oh my God, it’s a Sanskrit title. Thus it was with much surprise that I found myself falling over myself with positives to blabber about this debut LP […]