A full decade after the release of their debut album Highly Refined Pirates, Minus the Bear continue to prove their transcendence of hipster cool with yet another impressive collection of expert musicianship and great songwriting .
In lieu of the litany of great female groups who've emerged since Sleater-Kinney's demise–Vivian Girls, Dum Dum Girls, Lights, Brilliant Colors, Pussy Riot, even Wild Flag featuring former members Carrie Brownstein and Janet Weiss arguably speaking–none can truly match the unbridled intensity that made the Olympia trio's decade in rock so memorable.
After a May 2009 chance meeting at Bjork's memorable one-off collaborative concert with the Dirty Projectors at the Housing Works Bookstore in New York City where someone suggested they venture into a similar partnership with one another, the pair made good on the advice and got together to dream up this surprising golden nugget of an album they are calling Love This Giant.
When it comes to Woodstock-era English blues guitar, there isn't a more underrated axe than Alvin Lee. Yet his blistering fret work as the frontman for Ten Years After continues to resonate through the steel strings of such modern-day mavericks as Jack White, Dan Auerbach and Guy Davis Jr. as adroitly as fellow Brits Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton, whom the guitarist should be placed alongside more regularly in terms of his influence on the art of those who came after him.
That kind of pie-eyed affinity for pure pop makes Nocturne well worth a spin.
When you look at the entirety of the Blur catalog, however, as you can upon the release of this exhaustive reissue celebrating the group's 21st year, you will rediscover why Blur should always be considered–pound for pound–the best London rock band of the last two decades. And for those who cannot afford the $150 for the 18-CD, 3-DVD super deluxe shebang online or at your finer local record shop, obtaining it piecemeal is just as noble, if not more so in the fortunate event you have enough spare cash to invest in new music altogether let alone upgrades of your favorite records growing up.
When Liars emerged in 2001 with their scorching debut LP They Threw Us In A Trench And Stuck A Monument On Top, it was a caustic wad of spit in the mascaraed eyeball of everything trendy, vapid and annoying about hipster New York City in the turn of the century
Based on the full-throttle energy theybring forth on Ownerless, they have certainly earned their place warming up their mentor's massive Fender amps this time around.
More conventional fans of Mike Patton might want to wait until January of 2013 when the long-awaited new Tomahawk LP, Oddfellows, comes out, which the singer has described as "really heavy Beach Boys".
Yet this stuff still sounds like it was recorded on a one-speaker Emerson boom box from 1984. And to remove that sense of scratchiness from the listening experience of material like "Secret Knowledge of Back Roads" and "Bar Scene from Star Wars" would be akin to sucking the soul from its historical importance entirely, not to mention usurping the fun of the challenge in peeling away the fuzz to reveal the true grit of these wonderfully scrappy pop songs.
