The Abaco Sound / The Abaco Sound / Abaco Sound Publishing (CD)
The Abaco Sound is one of those vanity projects we all wish we could make -- essentially a bunch of friends getting together to make an album. Jim Butler and his friends' paean to life in the Bahamas will ring true to anyone who's spent any time in an island environment -- these lite-calypso "island music" songs are upbeat anthems about good weather, blue water, drinking and generally enjoying life to the fullest. Of course, if you're a rabidly humorless indie-rock nazi, you're going to hate this like nobody's business. Otherwise, it's likely to make you smile. It works best when you're actually on an island, as I found out when I took the disc with me to Hawaii... --
Iota / S/T / Slowball (7")
Four instrumental songs from this Gothenburg, Sweden trio, that are sure to toy with your eardrums, as each individual instrument plays its own sonorous games inside your speakers. Mentally engaging, Iota develops a basic rhythmic structure and then allows each instrument to vary slightly from a particular theme. Powerful, in a passive, relaxing way, Iota won’t floor you with distortion and drum overkill, but rather enters the mind, and introduces its own form of instrumentalism with melancholy guitar, percussive permutations and intricate bass structures. All of this begs the question, where's the full length!? --
Eve6 / Eve 6 / RCA Records (CD)
If you buy only five or six CD's a year, you might well find EVE6's take on guitar-driven alt-pop to be quite resonant and involving, with clever lyrics and a fistful of hooks. If, on the other hand, you buy (or otherwise acquire) a lot of music, you're a bit more likely to see the band as another variation on the commercial-alternative flavor of the month, albeit with more promise than some of the other crap on the airwaves. It's an important distinction, though, as the only real "sin" this disc is guilty of is not sounding sufficiently unique on the first listen -- and that's an entirely subjective assessment. --
Crib / She Is Church / WIN Records (CD)
She Is Church might be a stretch for bassist Devin Sarno (a.k.a. Crib) in the sense that he has traditionally toured with noise acts like Merzbow, Masonna and Speculum Fight and this is as un-noisy as you can get. What it retains, however, is Crib's fabulous mind-altering drones and textures. Gentle, yet deeply resonant tones intertwine, ebb and flow throughout the five improvised tracks that make up SIC. Fans of the sub-vocalizing Tibetan monks take note! Fans of the electric bass beware! Crib's approach to the instrument is far from conventional, I wager you'd be hard-pressed to identify Crib's axe as such by simply listening to the disc. It's the type of thing where you read the liner notes and go, "Wow! That's a bass?!?!?!" Yes, it is and what a bass! --
Various Artists / Greetings from Plastic City / Plastic City/Twisted (CD)
This continuously-mixed summation of the Plastic City label is the pinnacle of state-of-the-art techno and house. The tracks are funky, soulful and simple, and they all thump along at the 120-130 BPM tempos of the good old days. The loops are elegantly minimal, the samples are used earnestly and if you close your eyes for a while, you'll feel like it's 1:00 a.m. on a summer Saturday night, you're at a fantastic nightclub, and you have absolutely no obligations that require you to wake up before 5:00 p.m. on Sunday. In addition to two tracks from the always-excellent Terry Lee Brown Jr., Lexicon, Future Funk, the Timewriter and others contribute to the mix. --
Swindle / Within These Walls / Grilled Cheese Records (CD)
Imagine spiked hair, spiked belts and aggression with an extra scoop of bitterness, and a topping of 100% genuine hatred sauce. Swindle crank it out with aggro-distorted guitar and scream-sing vocals. With tunes like "Fuck Madonna" and "Fight Back," there's enough punk rock in here to share with a friend. Swindle sound exactly like what you think punk rock sounds like; and they do it well too, but hasn't it been done a zillion times over already? --
Far from being the musical equivalent of strained carrots, Babyfood offer four tracks full of hook-intensive guitar pop, with vocals that land between late eighties Britpop and fin de siecle Westerberg. The 'Mats resemblance is cemented by the guitars on "20,000 Miles", but none of these songs follow the genre's official verse-chorus-verse formula, choosing instead to take off in some surprising and enjoyable musical directions. There's also enough intensity and conviction here to make these songs stand out in a crowd -- this Babyfood deserves to be digested, rather than simply smeared all over your face, the high chair and the walls. --
Galileo's Sin / Death to the Strange / Stranger Records (CD)
Galileo's Sin combines punk rock laissez faire with acid rock flights of guitar fancy. The abstract forms and frenetic attitude of the music on Death to the Strange plunge toward psychedelia while the street-smart, photo-realism of singer Joe Hand's vocals plants the album firmly in modern reality. The band's nod to late '60s rock 'n' roll is unmistakable and in a decidedly southern direction (interesting for a band hailing from the Bronx!) -- many tunes borrow heavily from the blues. The most compelling argument Death to the Strange offers in favor of Galileo's Sin is its gutsiness. This stuff is balls to the wall! You can't not take this music seriously! --
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