Music

These guys are from Asheville, NC, and their record label’s website says they fucking rock, which I guess they do, in a sort of run-of-the-mill, Angry Young Men with Beards type of way. The Poles feature deep, theatrical growling for vocals, dark, heavy guitar work, and lots of bashing on the drums. You know – rock, man.

Rainer Maria’s records have always been like a Fourth of July sparkler: pretty, jovial but too quickly extinguished. The trio had a habit of releasing nine-song albums that fluttered in and out of the emo genre, and rarely clocked in over 30 minutes.

With up and coming acts like The Subways and Arctic Monkeys, the UK may be the grounds for the another indie rock revival, and Archie Bronson Outfit is more proof of this trend. Their angular guitar sound is complemented by the quick staccato tempo of Franz Ferdinand, gut-wrenching vocals, and a vast array of instrumentation.

Reining from the land of Deutsche, Rammstein has built a name for themselves as wondrous storytellers, a band steeped in imagery and metaphor, scaling the depths of inner-turmoil through compelling and even cutting lyrics. Of course, most of us stateside haven’t a clue.

Don’t let their jump to an indie record label fool you. The guys of Cincinnati-based quartet Moth return – polished and proper – with their fifth LP, Immune to Gravity.

The music of Howie Gelb and his on-again, off-again group Giant Sand is often described as Southwestern, as though we know what that means. Ah, the familiar sound of avocados and lizards.

Twenty-one-year-old Slick Ballinger picked up the guitar at age fifteen. He’s shared the stage with such artists as B.B. King and Pinetop Perkins, and even though 94-year-old Othar Turner of the Mississippi Rising Star Fife and Drum Band took young Slick under his wing and taught him to live and breath the blues in a small house with no electricity or running water, there seems to be one key element missing on his debut album: SOUL.

2006 has been a damn good year for new records from the world’s favorite indie-rock icons. In March, we can add Mogwai to the list with their first studio album since 2003’s Happy Music For Happy People.

It’s been a longstanding tradition in the post-punk music world for members of not-so-hard sounding bands to form side projects that throw their hands up to the heavy music that has influenced many an indie-rock musician. Sometimes this leads to poorly executed metal bands that ultimately mock the genre that the bands are trying to pay tribute to. Fortunately, this is not the case with Witch.

Bad Wizard is the greatest contemporary rock and roll band that no one is talking about. If you take the stage presence and energy of the Tight Bros From Way Back When, fuse it with a band that takes itself completely serious in its quest for big, loud stadium rock and threw in the best absolute influences like Led Zeppelin, ACDC, Guns ‘N’ Roses, and Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, you’d have Bad Wizard.

AIDS Wolf are a noise outfit out of Montreal, and I am gonna say right off the bat, I just don’t get it. Mostly squawking guitars, repetitive intricate bass lines, breakbeat drumming, and a howling chick add up to something kinda vaguely cool to me, but nothing I am gonna shit my pants over.

Eloquence and sunshine swirls about in the latest from the cherubic Scottish outfit. Like water off a duck’s back, the miseries of the world are repelled by The Life Pursuit, a plucky foray into Burt Bacharach territory.