The Jesus And Mary Chain Psychocandy; Darklands; Automatic; Honey's Dead; Stoned Rhino By: Eric Greenwood
If you only know three chords, play them loudly. The Jesus and Mary Chain took this axiom and turned it on its head. With a cache of predictable influences, Scottish brothers Jim and William Reid turned underground music into a [...]

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Sonic Youth Rather Ripped Geffen By: Eric Greenwood
As strange as it may seem, the first few notes of "Reena", the opening track of Sonic Youth's 14th album, Rather Ripped, sound like Belle & Sebastian. Has Sonic Youth gone twee? Well, no, not really, but it has put out its most concise, stripped down, [...]

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Regina Spektor Begin To Hope Sire By: Eric Greenwood
Regina Spektor isn't just another in an endless line of quirky female singer-songwriters with classical training; she adds Russian Jew from New York City to the formula, which may or may not scare you away. Her penchant for hyperbolic melancholy and fairy tale whimsy easily invites [...]

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Thom Yorke The Eraser XL By: Eric Greenwood
It's easy to assume that Thom Yorke pulls most of the strings in Radiohead. He's the singer, ergo, the focal point, and he plays guitar. It's a fair assumption. But one listen to The Eraser, and it's clear that his influence extends only so [...]

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Murder By Death In Bocca Al Lupo Tent Show By: Eric Greenwood
On its second album, Who Will Survive and What Will Be Left of Them? (a title knicked from a Texas Chainsaw Massacre promotional movie poster), Bloomington, Indiana's Murder By Death weaved a thematic story of the devil's infiltration of a small Mexican town [...]

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Anakrid Father Stereonucleosis By: Eric Greenwood
Since the unexpected demise of Newgenics (a heavily-hyped, short-lived amalgamation of notable local musicians that put out one seven-inch on Level Plane Records), Columbia, South Carolina's Chris Bickel has kept a low profile. Well, low for Chris Bickel. Bickel still has a weekly karaoke stint, Mr. B's Goodtime Karaoke [...]

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The Replacements Don't You Know Who I Think I Was? The Best Of The Replacements Rhino By: Eric Greenwood
The Replacements just couldn't get it right. The punks wrote them off as nothing more than a drunken bar band, while the drunks in bars wrote them off as drunken punks. Nobody would claim them except [...]

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30 Seconds To Mars A Beautiful Lie Virgin By: Eric Greenwood
Jared Leto is good at one thing: looking like a sullen, androgynous golem. Ok, ok, two things: the androgynous golem thing and looking believable when his face has been pulverized, as it was in Fight Club. Leto's claim to fame is still [...]

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Gnarles Barkley St. Elsewhere Downtown By: Eric Greenwood
Calling Gnarles Barkley hip-hop is a pretty uninformed cop-out. This album is so scattered and diverse that it makes pigeon-holing this unlikely duo, comprised of mash-up sample master Danger Mouse and Goodie Mob crooner Cee-Lo, into any genre subset more than just a little difficult.
With Danger [...]

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Mission Of Burma The Obliterati Matador By: Eric Greenwood
Mission of Burma just makes all the imitators sound silly. I simply can't get over how good this record is. When the band returned in 2004 with Onoffon, over two decades after disbanding due to guitarist Roger Miller's hearing loss, I was justifiably skeptical of its [...]

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The Raconteurs Broken Boy Soldiers V2 By: Eric Greenwood
Jack White's teaming up with power-pop soloist Brendan Benson and the rhythm section of the Greenhornes hardly constitutes a "supergroup" in my book, but, perhaps, that is more a testament to White's gigantic rock star stature than it is a reflection on the current state of [...]

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The Walkmen A Hundred Miles Off Record Collection By: Eric Greenwood
Not a band to embrace stagnation, New York City's The Walkmen reacts drastically to the overwhelming praise bestowed upon its second album, Bows + Arrows, with a confident step out of the murky shadows and into a brighter, more aggressive domain without sacrificing its [...]

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