Save for a couple pleasing exceptions – "Joker and Clown" and "By the Time I Get Home." – most of this Grand National sounds like Turin Brakes. Either that, or present-day ponderous Electric Soft Parade. Unappealing touchstones. Perhaps most troublesome of all, there are gruesome conga breakdowns that recall Guster. Nice legs on the cover art, though.
The staccato sound of struck typewriter keys on opening track “Nickels and Dimes” sets a tone of nostalgia for San Francisco's Scissors for Lefty. the latest in a line of West Coast bands with a penchant for Pulp.
Divergent from the dour sounds of fellow Scandinavian synth imps, The Knife, Datarock comes across like a Norwegian Ween (with wardrobe tips from Goldie Lookin’ Chain).
With a title and a band name like Loney, Dear, you wouldn’t be remiss to expect some severe wrist-slit baroque morbidity along the lines of Portishead.
The blurb on the front of The Broken West's I Can't Go On, I'll Go On likens this Los Angeles band to Big Star, Teenage Fanclub, and Merge labelmates Spoon. Add to that list Wilco. With vocal processing levels set to Tweedy, “Down in the Valley” and “Big City” could be B-sides from Wilco's Being There.
The latest in the string of Broken Social Scene satellite sirens to splinter forth from the fold into solo album orbit, Haines takes the restrained red velvet torch singer route previously trod by Leslie Feist, with less than successful results.
Reverb-laden vocals on the austere title track set a tone to match the doom and gloom associated with The Stills’ debut, but just when you think The Capitol Years has gone all Interpol, the band rips down the shroud to show you their shrine.
If Cormic McCarthy’s end-of-the-world novel The Road is made into a film before the world actually does end, this album by The Thermals should constitute the soundtrack.
Eleven tracks, each one a number (“Nine,” “Sixteen,” “Fifteen Parts 1 & 2”), none of it sequential, none of it essential.
White Light White Light starts out like the lovechild of Primal Scream and Kasabian, until the vocals kick in to put that unique Supersystem stamp upon it.
