Posts by Brian Gearing

The average male rock fan’s opinion of musicals is likely to encompass the word “suck,” but hand him The Dears’ Degeneration Street, and unless he’s a pure-bred metalhead, it’ll more likely go something like “…awesome…”

If Of Montreal’s over-sexed genre-hopping cast any doubt on Kevin Barnes’ commercial potential, False Priest puts them to rest.  With his (at least) metaphorical muse found in the enigmatic Janelle Monae, Barnes reigns in the verbal-orgy-as-art attention deficit freakout, and paints a pretty graphic picture of love in the age of therapy and public discourse. 

While old-schoolers bemoan the demise of the long-player in the iTunes era, Magnetic Island go back to the future on their debut EP, Out at Sea.

The debut from Tel Aviv guitarist and multi-instrumentalist Yair Yona attempts to bridge the vast span between atmospheric indie instrumentalism and Delta blues slide guitar, and while the result is undoubtedly original, it often comes to rest somewhere in the inter-genre no-man’s land reserved for smooth jazz and elevator music.

To say an artist has hit his stride is to hint that the road ahead is an easy, straight path, but maybe Ted Leo is due a little comfort.  With all its dollar-loaf white bread sandwiches and fitful couch sleep, Leo’s road has allowed him to grow gracefully. His sound has always been his own, but since Shake the Sheets in 2004, his hardcore roots have branched to a complete musical tree, and The Brutalist Bricks brings Leo’s pop and soul buds to full flower.

So Many Dynamos prove on their third release that you don’t have to play three chords and two melodies to smash guitars anymore.  On The Loud Wars, the St. Louis four-piece cuts and pastes warp speed beats and thrash-happy hooks over punk’s spit, piss and blood and ends up with a chaos-soaked pile of snarled lips, gashed thumbs and ringing ears that just might be one of the year’s best records.

Drive-By Truckers front-man Patterson Hood’s second solo record, Murdering Oscar (and other love songs), flows like a DBT rock show—hook ‘em, rest ‘em, then beat ‘em senseless—and while saving the best for last may not always be the best recipe for an album, Hood leaves nothing on his plate.

Anyone who has followed the Decemberists’ rise from just another quirky Portland, OR band to one of the most unique and celebrated indie acts around knew that this album was coming. With The Hazards of Love, Colin Meloy takes the band from the loose maritime and old-world concepts of their previous records to full-on rock opera.

With Here We GoMagic, Luke Temple completes his transformation from everyday singer/songwriter to eccentric bedroom visionary.  Trading standard instrumentation for a four-track, a sampler and some found sounds, Temple arranges broad sonic horizons and soft, intimate whispers into a singular aural vision that is hypnotic from the opening notes to the closing silence. 

Like their adopted African roots, Toubab Krewe’s music is meant to be shared, not locked behind soundproof glass, so while Orange Peel does at times lose some bite beneath the club’s high ceilings and constant white noise, it captures the band better than their 2005 studio debut.  

While Leo’s fifth album with the Pharmacists is far from a concept album, the ideas conjured by the title are all over it. Sure, “Army Bound,” “Bomb.Repeat.Bomb.” and “C.I.A.” continue the band’s tradition of political tongue-lashings and revolutionary rabble-rousing, but the overwhelming feeling of the record is that of a deep breath, accompanied by a couple sips of a drink on some faraway Spanish beach.

To simply dismiss Deerhoof as weird would be a bit unfair.  Sure, they’re not pumping All-American rock ‘n’ roll like The Hold Steady or Kings of Leon, but on the weirdometer, they’re still topping out before the Van Vleit Zone.

As a drummer, composer and bandleader for the past 27 years, Bobby Previte has been a perpetual music machine. With Coalition of the Willing, Previte is joined by Marco Benevento, Charlie Hunter, Skerik and Stanton Moore proving there are always inventive ways to serach for “it.”

With a new drummer on the bus, the Disco Biscuits are finally fueling up for their second leg, but not before taking one last look through the scrapbook on The Wind at Four to Fly. Recorded during what were then to be former drummer Sam Altman

Dates and times may be arbitrary human attempts to impose order amid the chaos, but the precision with which musical fads shift every time the ball drops can

30 Seconds to Mars combines the heartbreak and anguish of contemporary teen icons like Dashboard Confessional with all the sincerity of hair band power ballads, translating sunset strip fantasies to the 21st Century via self-doubt and impotence, and ending up blasting cock rock without the hard-on.

As the fancy-pants voice of power pop kings the New Pornographers, Dan Bejar

Lake Trout has grown to become a mature, focused band of rock careerists. The classic rock seeds of their youth and the jazz and hip-hop flavors of young adulthood merged with electronic inspirations, providing the the ability to weave those digital threads into ghostly indie rock.

For a guy who (according to legend) was raised by chickens and now tops off his blank-faced mannequin mask and long, black Jerry Curl wig with an empty KFC bucket, Buckethead makes some fairly normal music, but that seems to be the point.

Immolation/Immersion is the type of noisy, grating, experimental jazz that sends obsessive freaks into a tailspin of self-doubt and discovery.