Album Reviews

The Pacific Northwest is full of gold in the form of artists far too slept on, creating some crazy ass music locals love, but nationally kids are ambien layered to the booms and baps. Fuck the blonde pomped noise made by certain groups, not that I dislike such pomped noise, there's just WAY more here than them and it. Ol'Dominion should ring your fucking bell, and if it doesn't you're a complete asshole who lives in a deep dark radio safe hole. Or you hate the Northwest and America. You terrorist bastards!! All Your Friends Friends is a compilation which normally for me is strike one because it's hard to make something cohesive when there are 400 different voices on it, but this bias is broken and foot is fully inserted in my big fat mouth. It's less a compilation and more like a...

Just like The War On Drugs did last year with it's addicting moody haze, this is an album that's going to swoon me in stages. I know it. I JUST KNOW IT. I've completed Picture You about 5 times. At first the album was limited to just background music because I was working and couldn't give it my full attention. But it morphed into something a little more with each subsequent listen. I'd pick up on small parts in certain songs and say to myself: 'Fuck, this is Amazing.' (horrible pun intended). Those small parts started to multiply exponentially and now my concentration has done a complete 180. At listen #5 I was completely unable to delegate any attention to my work because my mind was ballz deep into The Amazing. These asshole's songs are like a semi-attractive girl who...

I have to admit that it has taken a few years for me to turn around on José González. At first, all I could think was, 'Great. Another guy with an acoustic guitar and feelings. I wonder what college quad they scraped this asshole off of.' Fortunately, I was wrong and I probably wouldn't have ever figured it out if they guy hadn't just kept making album after album for the last ten years. Although his parents are Argentines, singer/songwriter José González was born in Sweden, where he became nationally renowned for his mix of autumnal indie pop and intimate acoustics. Following stints with hardcore bands during the 1990s, González formed the indie rock outfit Junip alongside organist Elias Araya and drummer Tobias Winterkorn; they released their first EP, Straight Lines, in 2000....

I hate song by song reviews. But my life would be a lot different if I ever actually listened to myself. So bro... Open Mike Eagle has a new EP OUT! A Special Episode Of is another quality installment from my favorite rapper. It listens like an appendix to Dark Comedy, his critically-acclaimed album from last year. He continues to make me want to punch myself in the face with his rapping ability. In addition, this EP is chock-full of the amazing, off-kilter production Mike has been so good at finding. At this point it's expected. You're spoiling the people, dude. Rotten! And I love you for it! Exile's beat on Dark Comedy Late Show has a haunted little vocal stab that immediately gets me doing the Big Hero 6 though. FUZZY BABY! With his, Fuck you! I like the...

Sirens snuggles up on my hand like the tightest mink hobo gloves ever manually woven and kicks me in the domepiece like the feet of 1,000 cherubs: 500 gleeful, 500 morose. If balls have a face and my face has balls, Sirens kicked my balls in the face. It's the ferocious phalanx that is the guiding thread/light of Blue Sky Black Death's 2013 megawork Glaciers and the immaculate continuation that is GLACIERS//MELTED. Breadth is a constant companion that courses through the Lava Lamp-laden landscape that is Sirens; feebly attempting to constrict the dimensions to which it effortlessly, gracefully travels. All I've been able to see when I caress myself as of late is the technicolor mermaid gracing the cover bearing her glorious chesticles to me as she emerges from...

Tom: Where do I start? Where do I start? I feel like a teenager because grown adults shouldn't be infatuated with a musician to this degree. It rivals the days when I wrote 'pro-choice' on my arm in magic marker just like Eddie Vedder or thought Dave Matthews was a genius because just about every one of his songs was about carpe diem. Back in those days I not only liked the music I loved their aura of coolness (as juvenile as that sounds). I wanted to BE those musicians. I watched all their videos, I read all their interviews and I even bought their fucking biographies. Today I'm a lot more comfortable with myself and comfortable with the life I made and feel I should be above that shit. After all, we're all just people, right? Yet, I find myself looking up to Josh Tillamn (aka Father...

The key to being a good critic isn’t about having better taste than anyone else. It isn’t about having some magical sense for the next big thing. It certainly isn’t about being the smartest person in the world (camera pans to a syffal writer picking his nose). No, the key to being a good critic is knowing how to pull the signal from the noise. Believe me, there is a lot of fucking noise. There are only so many hours in the day to give albums a cursory first listen (let alone anything after that). On a typical day, you’ll probably get 50-60 press releases from every band that can afford a PR company. From that barrage of soundcloud links and extremely liberal definitions of what other bands sound like this new band (‘Oh, your band sounds like The Police, Nirvana, and Mumford & Sons?...

He awakens laying face flat on shredded carpet. The stench of burning and death fill the remnants of a once peaceful room. Now a pile of destruction is all that remains. What happened in here? He picks himself up from his blood soaked position and slowly surveys the damage. In the corner he finds his laptop with a cracked screen muffling what sounds like music through heavily damaged speakers. Wiping the blood and whiskey from what is left of the screen he sees what caused this chaos. The events start to come back to him. The new EP from Wiredogs. He was listening to Wiredogs and it caused him to rage so hard that he blacked out and destroyed everything in sight. It’s all coming back. They have a new EP called Kill The Artist Hype The Trash and it will make you bash your head...

From the first time I heard Lupe Fiasco on Ye's Touch The Sky I was interested to see what else he was coming with. Kick, Push made the old school skater in me happy, and long for the days of escaping my crazy ass parents for a wild adventures with my dudes, falling on our faces and boosting Newports. Albums came from Lupe, each had some killer records on them (Dumb Down, Go, Go, Gadget), but I never found myself going full on "fan mode" to the complete projects he released. He felt like a chick in your phone who was awesome on one date, but once it hit 4-5 dates she just became boring. Not because she wasn't smart, or didn't have her head on right, but shit just didn't click. But every once in a while, you run into her out and give it another shot,...

In Tall Buildings sounds like Matthew Sweet fronting Band of Horses meets Caribou, and then some really fucking cool space aged cell phone is ringing in the background, but you hear them all together and it's just the titties bro. Seriously tho, the way In Tall Buildings makes everything sound so rustic, yet futuristic is fucking delicious. Futurustic bro. In Tall Buildings is "futurustic". The acoustic guitar has GPS bro. Take the evenly calm meter in Exiled, it's nearly identical in skin feels to hearing some early untitled Band of Horses melody you can hum to yourself in a creaky rocking chair on some porch out in bufu. Your head is slowly bobbing from side to side until you realize you're now wearing an apple watch bro. Then on the other wrist bro? IS THAT A FITBIT BRO?!?!?!...