AltWeeklies Wire
Randy Whitt Unbottlesnew
He's on the lanky side, and his stride and stage presence suggest an abundance of energy waiting to escape.
Party at the Cartridge Family's Padnew
On Shine Like a Bottle, you'll be attending a pair of parties, both with a Replacements undercurrent.
Day Action Band on the Family Lifenew
On Wives & Babies, Matt and Nate O'Keefe sing largely about long workdays and kids in car seats and finding happiness at home. Not groundbreaking, no?
Tags: Day Action Band, Wives & Babies
'Crawl Inside Your Head' Roams Geek Turfnew
SNMNMNM's quirk-and-chorus has long had a wide appeal. This record won't change that.
Tags: Crawl Inside Your Head, SNMNMNM
Little Brother Has Something to Provenew
On Getback, Big Pooh and Phonte hint at apology, balancing newly nuanced social- and self-criticism.
Tags: Getback, Little Brother
Animal Collective: The Gateway Drug to Experimental Musicnew
Over five albums, they've developed a strident sonic approach, using noise, sustained tones, short, iterative samples, delirious tribal drumming and sing-to-the-sky harmonies to make points of skewing pop on a slow-burn pyre.
Tags: Animal Collective, Strawberry Jam
Dirty Projectors Cover Black Flag's Debutnew
The Projectors strip away the menace, offering lounge-ish musical beds that brightly color the misanthropic hue.
Tags: Rise Above, The Dirty Projectors
Regina Hexaphone Flexs Its Percussionnew
After the gentle, hazy drift of its debut, The Beautiful World, it's strange and thrilling to hear Regina Hexaphone exchange its exquisiteness for greater muscularity.
Double Negative's High-end Cacophonynew
The Wonderful and Frightening World of Double Negative is like a mangled eight-armed beast buried in the dust of a cartoon brawl.
This Will Do Just Finenew
Led constantly by the mercurial Herod through frequent line-up shifts, The Comas have been looking for their identity since sometime around 1998 -- they may have finally found one.
Kaleidoscopic Psychedelics & Sundried Melancholynew
This Chapel Hill five-piece doesn't try to hide the fact that they live for guitars.
Tags: *SONS, Viracochas
Southern Culture on the Skids & Heads on Sticksnew
These Southern iconoclasts have nailed the possum to the wall: Nobody captures the tragedy of upscale downward mobility better than Southern Culture on the Skids. Also reviewed: Heads on Sticks' The Pamphleteer.
