Album Reviews

With all the same-sounding major-label

Thunder, Lightning, Strike might actually be one of the only albums to have made Top Ten lists two years in a row and justly so.

Despite the hardcore backbone, their style of punk is less harsh and melodramatic, more refreshing, positive, and sincere.

With a good set of headphones and closed eyes, Elko can almost entirely deliver the Railroad Earth experience.

With enough Best of 2005 album lists to make even Sufjan Stevens blush, there

Welcome the next Oklahoma-bred catastrophe, Hinder.

The 19 tracks beat out any previous hits collection Arista has put out, and show how Lennox and Stewart, as eclectic songwriters, have had a thorough impact on modern artists like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

This past September, Fivespeed was featured on Stuff Magazines

Jamie Cullum

The band recently reissued this groundbreaking release with new packaging and three additional tracks, further affirming the sonic shift caused the characteristic tempo-bending time signatures and Vonnegut -like storytelling.

The Manx craft together a collage of wistful lyrics, amiable soundscapes, and pitch perfect production, courtesy of Wilco sideman Mikael Jorgensen

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.

This experiment is the closest thing to the psychedelic sounds that came out of the late 1960

If you’re really in the mood for this kind of thing, do yourself a favor and put in some Television, Velvet Underground or Stooges.

This album is a walk down memory lane from the birth and early adolescence of rap and hip-hop, to the modern mind-melting compositions that are quickly becoming staples of my play lists.

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

With rock bands coming and going like visitors to a mid-Western brothel, it

On their Steve Albini produced debut, Ahead of the Lions, Living Things rekindle a Stooges/MC5 riot rock energy with them, that muscles up whatever glam inklings their Marc Bolan side wants to reveal. Like most cheap riff living bands, Living Things offer little in the way of lyrics, but many meat servings in the way of balls to the wall guitar hero riffs that would fit into “School of Rock 101. “

You may not have realized they

Beginning with the band’s 2001 eponymous debut, the Memphis, Tenn. quartet has maintained an irreverent blend of country and punk that, over time, has been blurred into a very cohesive and organic coupling.