Baby

The sophomore set from the Texas-hailed band is a challenging listen that may tax some listeners due to the consistent, if sometimes, monotonous sound.

Pershing

Pershing, the new album from Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin, is named for a middle school band member Philip Dickey attended, and it blasts from the speakers with unabashed jangling indie rock joy. Layers of guitars and doubled vocals keep the band firmly attuned to their lo-fi roots on their second album.

Skeletal Lamping

I absolutely loved this album. Before laying down my justifications for such a grandiose statement, I must put forth a couple of caveats. First, this is the only Of Montreal album I have ever listened to. I was familiar with a few of their better-known songs, but that’s it. Skeletal Lamping is the band’s ninth studio album. Second, I don’t typically like the type of music Of Montreal makes.

Common Reaction

Long story short, I was hanging around in the student center at school where a flat screen television soundlessly flashed images of MTVu. Since I had largely stopped watching MTV more than a decade ago, I was pretty much ignoring it. That is, until I saw a grainy black and white cartoon of an obviously lovesick man trailing a raven-haired beauty down the street. Intrigued, I resolved to listen to the song at home and made note of the band's name—Uh Huh Her. I had never heard of the group before, and Los Angeles-based Uh Huh Her is a long way off from household name status.

Bubble and Scrape

A fifteen year reissue is much like a greatest hits collection: a triumph or moronic. Since Bubble and Scrape was mostly the former the first time around, Sebadoh’s 2008 re-release of their somewhat classic 1993 album is nothing to sneeze at. Hailed as the quirky, sometimes-inconsistent band’s arrival at the gates of indie rock heaven after a brief period in lo-fi purgatory, this album will either shake you up or leave you bored.

Elephant Shell

A college friend of mine was fond of saying that any album he found boring, underperforming, or straight-up bland – music that failed to move him to even the mildest active like or dislike – was “really mediocre.” Discs that merit this special kiss of death are usually just not very good. Sometimes they’re over-hyped, so-hot-right-now sophomore efforts, or ambitious projects that fell short of achieving the kind of transcendent finished product of which their creators seemed so capable when the first press release hit. You want a wrecking ball, this music barely leaves a mark.

New Moon

In my Alabama high school, our English teacher had us select writers to do a report on. She carefully went down the list announcing a name with a short one-line bio to quickly introduce the writer to the class. My hand shot up to claim Sylvia Plath when I learned she committed suicide in her thirties; I was morbidly intrigued. In preparation for that school report I remember sitting in the library with headphones on listening to a BBC recording Plath made of her poem "Lady Lazarus." I can still hear the tone in her voice when she announces: "I have done it again.

Knife the Symphony EP

I was having a particularly foul day when the Knife the Symphony EP arrived. I distinctly remember being angry at music, and wishing I had something new to listen to that didn’t bore the crap out of me. It was as if someone from Feminist Review was reading my thoughts, and I threw on the five song EP immediately. I’ve never been a huge fan of indie rock, but this band is enjoyable and not terribly monotonous as others as the same ilk.

Arco Iris

Upon first listen to Skybox’s single “Various Kitchen Utensils,” you feel transported into the center of a 1920’s silent comedy, or perhaps something starring Buster Keater. The unique pairing of rock music with the sound of old-time vaudeville somehow manages to blend seamlessly and makes for an interesting and fun sound that leaves you wanting more. If indie rock has a flaw it is that it often takes itself too seriously, but Phoenix-based Skybox has found a way to keep all of the joy and edginess of indie rock without losing their sense of humor.

Thirteen Tales of Love and Revenge

When I started to listen to Thirteen Tales of Love and Revenge, I thought “Oh, folk rock, how… er… nice.” Not that I have anything against folk rock, but… Then the beat kicked in. Forty minutes later, I was still dancing in my seat. This music rocks! The lyrics are good poetry about love, sex and strong women. There are some out of the ordinary instruments used on this album, such as a glockenspiel. I like different; it makes my senses perk up.

Hope: and Songs to Sing

Mike Law started Eulcid on a whim in 1996. Although the band wrote the music for their first song in one evening, their first album, The Wind Blew All the Fires Out, took a year to put together and debuted in 2000. Six years, and several different band members later, Eulcid has released another full-length CD. The theme of this album, Hope and Songs to Sing, seemed more about crying out at injustices than about hope, although perhaps crying out in complaint is a first step in that direction. I was not very impressed with the music or singing in the first few songs.

One Score and Four

The Good Players coalesce around the refined songcraft of one Stephen Nichols, equal parts weak-in-the-knees crooner and twisted studio-as-instrumentalist. Their most recent EP, One Score and Four, channels Jeff Lynne’s aesthetics of orchestral rock excess into the 21st century, absorbing the aleatory dissonance prevalent in contemporary electronic/art music while somehow leaving pretension to us music critics. This is itself an impressive aural feat, but how he and his dirty dozen manifest this meticulous multi-dimensionality live has to be seen to be believed.