Year: 2008

Looking back on 2007, the members of Chicago’s The Interiors, Chase Duncan (vocals, guitar), Collin Jordan (bass), and Brian Lubinsky (drums), come to a clear consensus: It was a shitty fucking year. The band survived car crashes, divorce, and accidental amputation. As the old adage goes, what didn’t kill them made them stronger.

It’s a mark of profound mystical power when a band manages to embrace pop (sort of) and become all the stranger for it. Considering, however, that Japanese avant-metal trio Boris set out to incorporate sounds “beyond music” with their latest recording, Smile, the inclusion of big hooks and epic schmaltz in their cacophonous mix of drone, noise, and psychedelic bluster was bound to sound less predictable than it looked on paper. Boris, in fact, sounds more alien the more familiar the ground they tread.

July 8th was quite a day for funkadelic, robot-rocker Beck. In addition to celebrating his thirty-eighth birthday, Beck also celebrated the release of his highly anticipated album, Modern Guilt. The disc was produced by acclaimed producer/collaborator, DJ Danger Mouse (a.k.a Brian Joseph Burton), but earlier this month rumors began to surface that Guilt would also feature several contributions by famed singer/songwriter Cat Power (a.k.a Charlyn “Chan” Marshall).

Shudder to Think have been hinting at a full-blown reunion since last September’s quasi-reunion at NYC’s Mercury Lounge saw former members, Craig Wedren, Nathan Larson, and Kevin March take the stage together for a brief set. Since then Larson and Wedren have played at a Barrack Rock event, which Wedren orchestrated, and have signed Shudder on to play the Virgin Mobil Festival in August. Now they have announced that a formal reunion tour is a definite…

Willamette Week’s annual Musicfest NW announced their lineup this week, which is shaping up to be one of the most exciting of the summer.  TV on the Radio, Mogwai, Murder City Devils, Del the Funky Homosapien, and Xavier Rudd are just a few of this year’s outstanding acts at this years festivities, which take place at various clubs and venues in Portland, OR, September 3-6.

The Black Angels presented a foreboding mix of dark psychedelic rock and tribal fuzz on 2006’s Passover (Light in the Attic). With Directions to See a Ghost, they continue mining that vein with greater results. The first two songs on the album, “You on the Run” and “Doves,” could have been right off Passover with their familiar drum patterns and echo-laden guitar. This may be because the band wrote most of these songs shortly after Passover was recorded.

The nihilistic lyrics and abrasive sound of Ontario hardcore act Cursed easily defy any stereotype of perpetual good cheer routinely lobbed at Canadians. With three of its four members originating from lauded ‘90’s hardcore outfit The Swarm, hostility is part of Cursed’s pedigree. Their latest release, III: Architects of Troubled Sleep (Goodfellow), lives up to the band’s reputation as one of the most raw and pissed-off bands in hardcore.

World traveler and US ex-pat Tod A. (Tod Ashley) of Firewater has recently arrived in United States to prepare for his band’s upcoming tour, supporting their sixth record, Golden Hour (Bloodshot). Although he has intermittently returned stateside, such as for a string of appearances last spring, since 2005 most of his time has been spent outside the country. Living abroad, he says, “Gives you a bit of perspective on Americans. Everything [here] is enormous without any particular reason except we can afford it… The rest of the world has to get along how they can.”

In its finer moments, Capsules manages to evoke the wistful, dreamy aesthetic that The Balustrade Ensemble is clearly making a great effort to convey. Unfortunately, the album often sounds like looped interludes from a Cocteau Twins album. Vocalist Wendy Allen’s wordless intonations seem a direct descendant of Elizabeth Fraser’s style boiled down to its most vague fundamentals.

Walter Martin and Paloma Muñoz, known as Martin & Muñoz, are snowglobe-making partners from Pennsylvania with a studio in Brooklyn. Their globes, which they photograph then adjust in Photoshop, are presented in Travelers along with a staccato short story by Jonathan Lethem. The globes, made from carefully treated and deviously rearranged model railroad pieces, create cinematic snapshots of fear, paranoid sentiment, and playful nightmare.

The ever-changing and simply unclassifiable musical experiment known as Animal Collective has a number of exciting and acclaimed records to its name, and it possesses an admirable restlessness that has kept it from repeating itself. The music is synchronous, fusing folk, psychedelia, electronica, and noise pop, among other genres, in varying proportions. On past efforts, an abundance of ideas solidified the band’s reputation as one of the most inventive acts of the early 2000s. On this new four song EP, Water Curses, the well is starting to run dry.