Album Reviews

Keeping track of what is going on in the San Francisco music scene should be someone's fucking full-time job. With the constant barrage of releases, collaborations, side-projects, and lineup changes, it is god damned impossible to know from day to day what is going on out there. It's almost as if Guided By Voices gave birth to every band in the city of San Francisco. Making it only more difficult is the fact that the San Francisco psychedelic rock scene, with label Castle Face Records at its brain center, is something that you have to keep an ear on. Some of the best records of the last decade have come out of this area, including those from acts like Ty Segall, The Dodos, Papercuts, OBN III's, Sleepy Sun, Wooden Shjips, Howlin' Rain, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Coachwhips, Whirr, Tycho...

Look, I've got redneck in my blood. I grew up in a household that watched TNN back when it was all reruns of Crook & Chase, monster truck rallies, and NWA Professional Wrestling. My first slow dance with a girl was to a Garth Brooks song. I have been on family vacations to Branson, Missouri. I keep a framed autographed 8x10 of Ray Stevens amongst the few collections still surviving my childhood. My family was proud to live ten minutes away from the setting of Mama's Family (as a side note, Raytown would make for a very different show today). Hee-Haw was a weekly television event. As I've gotten older, I've been able to bury most of it under years of living in major Northern cities and useless English degrees. Every so often though, an artist pops up the tears the...

Who is Red Pill? A matrix enthusiast perhaps? A Detroit native for certain, and he's also a part of Mello Music Group's Ugly Heroes along with Apollo Brown and Verbal Kent. But for me Red Pill is the continuation of the "every working class person" story that had been long carried by Slug, The Grouch, Blueprint and others. No guys, Red Pill isn't getting lyrical spiritual miracle on you, rapping about protons and antimatter, unless you count him rapping about things that anti-matter (get it?! Eehh..?! Eehh?!!). Red Pill knows how to tell his story with the casual, self-depreciating style we've come to love from artists like Open Mike Eagle, and comedians Mark Maron and Louis CK. On the opener "Meh", Pill is not too keen on what's going on around him and openly processes problems in...

And So I Watch You From Afar have been one of the most consistent musical forces in my post rock bag of tricks and licks for years now. The cinematic thrusts and epic moisture they conjure out of my lumpy and balding body are what many would call obscene, but for those in the know, And So I Watch You From Afar are pure fucking energy. And I don't really mean they're just energy. I mean, literally, they are fucking energy. Like, the energy needed to fuck and created by fucking. And So I Watch You From Afar are "fucking energy". Their latest album, Heirs, is more of what I expected musically, but they've added this dimension that, whether it was there before or not I don't know, seems to have brought the guys together in the fact that they're basically scoring a movie that they can...

I have many friends that love The Tallest Man On Earth. They even feel that they have the license to casually refer to him as TMOE. And then they'll casually drop that acronym in a sentence and assume I know who the fuck they are talking about like it's as common as FBI or NATO or some shit. 'Bro, I'm going to go grab some fish tacos before heading into TMOE on Saturday' huh? Is that some sort of cleansing state? WTF are you talking about? So, while I'm familiar with TMOE (Yes, i'm acronyming the shit out of TMOE in this review), I never really got into TMOE. I'd hear a song....I'd enjoy it...I'd intend to check it out, but never got around to it. It's kinda like my relationship with Mumford and Sons. I know they are good, but to a fault I get all 'Pitchforky' before I hitch myself to a...

I'll start of by saying this, 3 Seashells is either nails on a chalk board, while getting nagged by your wife or the first time you got a handjob. For me, it's the second choice. Sure, it was rough and kind of hurt, BUT you powered thru and busted that nut, half on your chest and some on your neck area a bit. All with a huge, idiot, 14 year old, dumbass smile on your face. Now, Lakutis raps like a person who could give two runny shits about you as a person. It's like he got his beats and was like, " yo...I'm going to write some shit that's going to piss really old white people off at a red light AND stupid ass whiney, 90's elitist, backpack wearing, 40-year old hip-hop purists." I'm willing to bet one of my six kids that he completed that personal goal with the score of a 100%...

Young Scallops Hotel, aka Milo, aka Rory, aka I love this dude I first met the music when I stumbled onto I wish my brother rob was here, then Milo Takes Baths, and then fan-boyed out when Milo sent me a Facebook message with a free download of the Things that happen.. EPs. Not only was the dude mad nice as a human, but TTHAD/TTHAN solidified his place as a new, prolific and important voice amongst other already incredibly smart, talented and established guys like Busdriver, Open Mike Eagle, and Nocando. Like many clever, verbose artists before him, he had another alias aside from the now newly loved & established Milo. Who the fuck was Scallops Hotel, what the hell did that even mean, and am I getting to old to know what's happening?! Thankfully my panic...

I was born in 1979 by a generation of high school drops outs who were either in a war or protested a war. They all had one thing in common. That one thing was drugs and rock roll. (OK, so that's two things but fuck you! Everybody HATES you, math fascist ). So anyways...Where was I? Oh yeah...King Gizzard. This band takes me back to a time when my dad used to jam Led Zeppelin in the car, smoking with the windows rolled up and yelling at me because I put my shirt over my mouth to block the future emphysema and lung tumors. The only reason this part of the story is important is because I like to talk about myself...a lot. Now that I've set the tone of how this music needs to be heard (smokey, late, and with long hair), we can talk about the band. King Gizzard is a 7 to 78 piece band as far...

Oddisee, out of Washington, DC, just made his way to my ear holes. This might mean I'm less up to speed than I fancy myself. This might just mean that I'm on the right path. This might mean that I'm old and fuck and just spent the last half hour unclogging a vacuum cleaner of a stray shoelace. FUCK ME FOR TRYING TO CLEAN HOUSE, RIGHT? Oddisee's The Good Fight first slaps you up side the head with that jazz tip. I don't know if you've ever been slapped upside the head with a jazz tip. But it feels great. When you're in the mood to be slapped upside the head with a jazz tip. Otherwise, ew! The first track, "That's Love," is like a conversation, with raps like horn riffs, switching between choppy and a conversational flow. Oddisee strikes me as a dude who didn't bump much gangster...

I'm not someone who should be gushing over an album like Strange Trails. Historically speaking, I shouldn'tve even started listening to Lord Huron in the first fucking place. I judged this particular book by its cover, and because its cover reminded me of my Great Aunt Lea's house on Christmas, I gave the shit a single spin. But then something weird happened, I didn't take it out for an entire week. And then I managed to whip it out in places I normally wouldn't whip out music I normally wouldn't even whip music out in, which isn't normal. (*Yes, I could edit this sentence, but fuck you bro, it's not like I'm wearing Crocs or some shit. JUDGE ME THEN.) A few days after I got bit by Lord Huron my youngest son, the boy twin, wouldn't stop punching himself in the crotch when it was...