Album Reviews

Tommy V you mother fucker! How do you know me so well? You are my Aztecan god and I am your sacrifice, you fucking asshole! With Travel Size Drawing Board you hold my still-beating heart in your supple hands, my brother. For the uninitiated, Tommy V got his start in the late 90s along with Awol One and the Shape Shifters and Dose One and Why?. I first heard of him as a member of Toca, the Latin punk rap tossed ensalada that featured a cast of characters including: Ceschi and David Ramos (Fake Four, Inc.), Xololonxinxo (Of Mexican Descent) and Math Heath (Child Actor). Then, I think for me and the rest of the world, Tommy V just kind of went away. I slept hard on his return release called Mockingbird from a couple of years ago. Travel Size Drawing Board though...

When you're working with a name as ethereally suggestive as St. Tropez you have two options bro. First, sound as far away from something you would expect to be related to what your mind thinks when you think St. Tropez, because you're a dick. Or the other is to sound efuckingxactly like that feeling you're wearing around your neck like a freshly laundered collar from a shirt that's unbuttoned at the top three bottoms, untucked and adorned with miniature palm trees bro. St. Tropez sound like they're not wearing shoes. St. Tropez sound like they all just met on one of those Contiki cruises that all the young Fucks are doing nowadays, with their tinders and their polyamorous relationships and their Valtrex. St. Tropez are the Abercrombie & Fitch commercial for the socially awkward, but...

He's been "sick of waiting..." for a long time. He's battle rapped his bearded, pancake ass into scribble jam folklore as Xaul Xan. He's got the sickest cat sweater game in the independent music scene, and the hairballs to prove it. Sage Francis has never been afraid of exposing those dark places (I've got the icloud hacked pictures right here), and he brings those darknesses to light on Copper Gone. You can't kill him muthafucker! You also can't deny that he's one of the most consistent writers in music living today. His least loved album is Li(f)e, and if you get off your high horse and listen to it again he wrote some amazing ass songs all backed by a band, on some Springsteen every man struggle shit. Copper Gone finds the Rhode Island bridge gnome delivering some of...

I've had this album forfuckingever. I've listened to this album so much I didn't even know if it was appropriate to write about it. Death From Above 1979's new album The Physical World is the one album from 2014 that I need to hear live. There is no question, I will go to the end of my wallet's earths to see this performed live. The Physical World is fucking everything. Just when I thought I was destined to have only digitally-assisted electro pop jams to look back on this year, DFA1979 gave me the only rock album of 2014 that matters. The riffage contained within, hark, is some of the most deliciously consistent head throwing rock and mother fucking rock and fucking roll I have ever had the pleasure of being smitten with. I'm having a very difficult time finding time...

I find myself in a writing slump on occasion. It's either the change of season's, or my personal life, or perhaps being in a musical stagnation. Regardless of why, when I’m in that state I eventually find something like Superficial. You should, by now, be tired of having sensationalized pop garbage splashed in your face to distract you from the fact that there are rappers out there that sound like Jay, that sound like Kendrick, that aren’t getting that major push telling you THESE are the only rappers you’re allowed to hear about. There are other options out there. There are people putting their heart and soul into their music hoping for it to catch the right ear. They might only have a couple hundred likes or listens or views, but that doesn’t define the quality level of the music. I...

Brando: I haven't fucked with Metermaids much before now. I had heard of them, bumped something from somewhere at some point. But We Brought Knives is their first release to give me an existential crisis of the "DO I EVEN LIKE BACON ANYMORE?" variety. I feel like the very first question if I interviewed them would be: "Bros, Metermaids, really?" Ralph: I have no shame in admitting I hate meter maids with a passion! They walk around like pretend cops, monitoring how long I've parked, and which Strange Famous records are in my car. It's Orwellian villainy at its worst. But, I was informed by Brando these weren’t THOSE meter maids. These are THE Metermaids of Uncle Sage's Strange Famous Records whom I slept ever so gently on. Good news for me though, because We Brought Knives...

Ralph Perez: There are way to many internet rap sensations, and blog flavors of the month to keep the Fuck up with these days. So, when a theory went around that some new MC named Your Old Droog was really a Nas side project I stopped, then kept going because I love Nas, but was probably still drooling over Clippings. Your Old Droog is NOT Nas, but he is what I fucking love about lyricism, which feels lost sometimes these days. Dudes got crazy wordplay, and one of those classic MC voices that stands out (Like Nas, G Rap and MF Doom have). It's hard to pick stand outs when he's got so many darts on here. He's Butt fucking incredible!! "Bad to the bone" opens with Droog stepping out like a seasoned vet crushing the guitar heavy sample. THIS fucking guy has such ill word play, and his...

New York Telephone, ladies and gentleman, is the newest and honestly greatest album Uncommon Nasa has thrown at us since he tore his rotator cuff beating a cabbie for shitting on SONS OF ANARCHY. He loves that damn show, as much as he loves the massive ears and legacy of Reggie Miller and his PACERS. I digress, or regress, or both, either way I'm moving the Fuck on to the music. Uncommon Nasa is a man of deep New York rap roots. Far too many either dwell on that, or are clueless to it. Guys, the man engineered and mixed most of all the early Definitive Jux albums. Nasa also appeared as a part of his now disbanded group The Presence, on the Atoms Family compilations, and Definitive Jux presents compilations. Outside of those, he formed his own label Uncommon Records and released...

Unicorns galloped mightily in the sprawling fields that lined the valley beneath my childhood dream home; or the house I would visit while I slept. They'd learned to live in the auspices of the Cockatrice and alongside the weasels who were immune to the Cockatrices' methods of attack. The Cockatrice Coterie had long ago banished any trace of a single mirror because all it took was a single glance of a Cockatrice upon itself to bring upon instantaneous death. For over three decades I'd gone without seeing so much as my own reflection; if I was ugly I wouldn't know it and if I was handsome I wouldn't believe it. When I was a very young child, of preschool age, I was forbidden from stepping foot in the paddocks pockmarking the plains used as playgrounds by the Monoceros. From a distance I...

I haven’t done really punk rock shit like trash a convenient store or yell at my mom in a long time. Because I’m, for the most part, what you would call an adult. And thus cannot be trusted. But there is a part of me that remembers almost going to juvenile hall. There’s a part of me that remembers my friend hitting a kid in the head with a skateboard. There’s a part of me that remembers slinkily drinking Early Times whiskey in a ditch behind the park. There a part of me that I’ll probably forget soon because I smoked a lot of weed out of aluminum cans when my stupid preteen monkey brain was still forming. There a part of me that will always be all about ninjas and pirates and lasers and shit. That’s why I got a stirring in my loin piece for party punkers, Purple. If Peter Piper picked a...