Cursive Happy Hollow Saddle Creek By: Eric Greenwood The Ugly Organ is my favorite Cursive album, hands down, and it was Kasher's post-post break-up album. It was the culmination of all the promiscuity, drunken nights, and wrong words said turned into a corrosive morass of regret, jealousy, anger, and frustration. It played into the very […]

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Journey Greatest Hits Columbia By: Michael Jones While the remaining members of Journey besmirch their legacy touring with, of all things, a former Gap employee filling in for Steve Perry, Columbia Records is re-mastering and re-releasing Journey's entire back catalog, beginning with Greatest Hits, and the timing couldn't be better: a new audience, too young […]

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Alaska The Tiger Now We're Familiar Naked Kids Doing Karate By: Eric Greenwood Yes, Alaska the Tiger's name follows the same convention as Pedro the Lion's, but any similarities to the Jade Tree sound end right there. This Columbia, South Carolina trio owes little to nothing to the modern day emo movement, harkening back further […]

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Junior Boys So This Is Goodbye Domino By: Eric Greenwood In today's gimmicky, instant gratification and overly niche music market, bands that present themselves in vagueness and anti-image often seem married to a sense of bittersweet nostalgia that doesn't have much bite in 2006. However, mystery still has an inexplicable allure, especially when it's cloaked […]

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Phoenix It's Never Been Like That Astralwerks By: Eric Greenwood Pop music rarely gets any proper respect, what with all the schlock that permeates commercial radio, but it's pop's melodic accessibility that inherently marks it as music for the masses, which, of course, is typically frowned upon by any discerning arbiter of taste. Thus, calling […]

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Danielson Ships Secretly Canadian By: Eric Greenwood With a shrill, pixie-stick blurt to his uneven and deliberately jagged cadence, Daniel Smith resembles the Pixies' Black Francis on crack- two octaves higher and even more erratic. It's an undeniably acquired vocal style, which, coupled with his penchant for wildly eccentric instrumentation and wide-eyed innocence, can make […]

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The Knife Silent Shout Mute By: Kerry M On this, the third record from Sweden's sibling duo The Knife, we find Olof Dreijer and Karin Dreijer Andersson delivering another dose of their signature synthladen eurotrash pop cacophony. Karin's processed vocals often channel a sort of strung-out and carbonite encrusted Kate Bush while icy, Spector-like walls […]

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