Posts by Eric Saeger

RANDOM STABBINGS & ARTLESS CRITIQUE – July 2007 Bitter Bitter Weeks, Peace is Burning Like a River (High Two Records)In his third full-length LP, Philadelphia’s Brian McTear condenses his keep-it-simple 80s-indie formula, obsessing less on lonely-spotlight unpluggedness and more on full-band, edge-of-the-world 4-chord fluff-pomp.  His voice is of trademark caliber now, tempering the antsiness of […]

RANDOM STABBINGS & ARTLESS CRITIQUE – June 2007 Art Brut, It’s a Bit Complicated (Downtown Records)Picking up where they left off in Bang Bang Rock & Roll, the weird little punk-rock experiment that is Art Brut moves into its next level of maturity.  You’ll recall the cockney narrator exulting over seeing his Brand New Girlfriend […]

RANDOM STABBINGS & ARTLESS CRITIQUE – May 2007 I’m From Barcelona, Let Me Introduce My Friends (Mute Records) Raffi for crook-leg dancers, requiring 29 band members to get its point across.  Fans of TV’s Fawlty Towers are well familiar with Manuel the waiter’s all-purpose tag line, and ironically enough that’s the approximate size of the […]

RANDOM STABBINGS & ARTLESS CRITIQUE – April, 2007 Combichrist, What the F—k Is Wrong With You People (Metropolis Records) More like What the F—k is Wrong With Combichrist, which we’ll discuss in just a sec, because I think I know.  Combichrist is a super-techno-noise-punk project from Norway’s Andy LaPlegua, WTF  his second effort after the […]

Kristoffer Ragnstam, “Sweet Bills” (Bluhammock Records)Admirers of Spoon and Sufjan alike may find common ground in this collection of alt-rock-ified sketches of violent genre collisions tabled by an artist with a suspicious amount of consonants in his name.  The melting pot is so vast but quirkily accessible here that the easiest comparison that comes to […]

RANDOM STABBINGS & ARTLESS CRITIQUE Torpedo Boyz, “Headache Music" (Sounds From the Roof Records) Funky, kinda crunky Europeans with refreshingly major attitudes (all the funnier given their Ahnold accents), Torpedo Boyz are a lot like 70s funkadelica as seen through a Felix Da Housecat prism.  There are plenty of layers going on, which gives weight […]

RANDOM STABBINGS & ARTLESS CRITIQUE Black Elk, Black Elk (Crucial Blast Records)A band that can’t decide whether to be Red Scare calc, Melvins fuzz-froth or Lake of Dracula no-wave, and the world is better off while they’re making up their minds.  Black Elk’s cacophony will probably end up getting lumped in the section of your […]

July 2006 edition

A look at some of the newest in underground releases.

In this mystery meat pot-roast of goth-industrial-futurepop sub-Bjorkings, Ex-Swan Jarboe presents the most hiply presentable slices of her life over the past six years