Billy Squier-like nasality over spandex metal. It’s brave and sweet that all hands have closed their minds to the music of the past 20 years, and if their filler didn’t so obviously plagiarize pre-computer-age toxic waste like Whitesnake’s “Still of the Night” (“Take Me Now”) we’d be able to praise the Burgess Meredith character in […]

AAA-league neo-70s guitar rock starring the definitively adequate vocals of the singer songwriter. Leadoff number “Window in the Dark” steals the chilly thunder of BOC’s “Don’t Fear the Reaper” but fails to pay off with a palatable chorus section, which is the running weakness throughout. “Lazy Sunday Afternoon” is Lucy in the Sky sans diamonds, […]

Hickish alt-rock smacking of Old 97s in a Stones mood; as such it’s a mixed bag as far as hooks, whether or not originality is a constant. The bass is positively buried in the mix, which favors (and rightly so, if not to such extremes) Tom Townsend’s Van Morrison/Tom Petty tenor. “This Time” would achieve […]

Desolate goth-doom dirges of the Type O kind. The album begins with a thoughtfully baroque-ish bit of acoustic guitar to tee up “Dead Air,” a heavy ditty remindful of Candlemass, switching to Thursday-emo at the choruses, a demonstration for posterity that they aren’t solely reliant on common graveyard-rock fauna. “A Dream Resigned” mixes Metallica and […]

Connecticut-based Requena’s boardroom-slick Gloria Estefan soprano is well worth the princely studio values that Sony-ize this collection of salsa-pop; it’s dentist-office Enrique Iglesias for men who swoon. Three songs are her own creations, treated like the others to fine arranging by an assortment of clever deck-hands. All the songs save for one are sung in […]

With the relentless advance of Myspace, the whole squeezing-every-ounce-out-of-one’s-laptop thing seems to have a growing appeal to punters with rudimentary grasps of rhythm. Automatically that means it’s not always advisable. Here we have a mostly instrumental effort consisting of breakbeats with soul, breakbeats with rasta riddims, breakbeats with chill, and breakbeats with sausage and anchovies. […]

As Depeche Mode archaeologists go, Backlash prove themselves capable of faithfully maintaining the original aesthetic and retrofitting it with sufficient futurepop advancements to front a viable mainstream assault. A surprising record, this was first made available in 2004 through import scalpers and has just now been forked over to Wtii for wide US release. Would […]

God help us, even the Mothersbaugh spuds have been assimilated. In this Disney-concocted black op, original Devo songs have been McDonaldized into nothing more than music to trash Toys R Us to, sung by sugar-bender clean-kiddies chosen for their docility, Wite-Out teeth and ability to withstand the Joan Crawford “encouragement” of their stage mommies. This […]

SPV forges ahead with its practice of ghouling up the remains of bands you’d thought you’d forgotten, hooking them up to spaghetti messes of IVs and kicking back to watch the schooling. In the past year or two their roster has seen Eric Burdon, Motorhead, Skinny Puppy, and now Brazilian thrash-crackers Sepultura, who were jaws-of-lifed […]

The wide-open-door policy of this office’s mailbox sees the oddest cockle shells come in on the tide, some of which appear to fit in only the most special of specialty coverage. In this case almost nothing is as it seems: perhaps it’s the constant bombardment of yell-core albums dressed in bucolic CD covers that had […]

A busker/dealer of songs that sprout from his clinical interest in (and monk-like reverence for) the New York subway commuters that comprise his audience, Eastwind is a walking theoretical about late-night collaborations between Sting, Jimmy Barnes and Jack Johnson. The confident chill-pop routed through this effort is hugely accessible, revealing a pure talent for neo-70s […]

The star-studded list of session and live experiences of the individual members of this left-coast jazz crew could have served to ruin their joint output, but the oldies they chose were given full-spa treatments that leave no room for improvement. Leadoff track “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To” does up the Cole Porter […]

Vomit-spattered Beelzebub worship indemnified by random acts of jiggling speed metal in case mom checks in with sandwiches. Despite such dishwasher-safe Cradle of Filth gimmickry there’s a Manowar-or-something doppelganger steering them toward more sublime ideas of brutish impact, and the punk part of the equation is DIY in the tradition of gore-core tape-trading’s first wave. […]