The Sisterhood Of Convoluted Thinkers Ume Sour Darla By: Eric Greenwood To say that The Sisterhood Of Convoluted Thinkers' music is unconventional doesn't even begin to cover it. Underneath all the weirdness you can hear Rob Christiansen's indie rock roots. He played with Mark Robinson and Jenny Toomey in Grenadine and was the trombone player […]

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The Revolutionary Hydra The Swiss Admiral EP Burnout By: Eric Greenwood The Revolutionary Hydra follows up its quirky, idiosyncratic if not longwinded opus, The Antiphony, with this slightly more straightforward and ear-catching EP. Catchy pop rarely comes cloaked in this much dissonance and nonchalance; but then again Pavement made a career out of such anti-pop-is-pop […]

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Kristin Hersh Sunny Border Blue 4ad By: Eric Greenwood "I wanted you to sleep with her and hate yourself instead of me/I wanted you untrue, hating yourself like me" ("Spain"). Kristin Hersh has never been one to mince words, but Sunny Border Blue finds her in a much darker place than usual, and if you're […]

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Unwound Leaves Turn Inside You Kill Rock Stars By: Eric Greenwood Unwound is finally back, but you may not recognize the sound. The trio's seventh album is far and away its most ambitious and musically diverse. The departure is immediately obvious. Where past albums like New Plastic Ideas and Repetition balanced odd syncopation with controlled […]

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Rocket From The Crypt Group Sounds Vagrant By: Eric Greenwood Ten years after its aggressive debut, Paint As A Fragrance, Rocket From The Crypt is still churning out a raucous blend of fifties rock and roll, garage punk, and rockabilly guitar machismo complete with inter-stellar horns. The band may have been through a predictably messy […]

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Ladytron 604 Emperor Norton By: Patrick Doherty You knew it was just a matter of time before someone would try to cross icy new-wave with Japanese electro-pop and German isolationism, but who would have thought it would sound like this? Ladytron punches giant holes in the stereotype of new new-wavers as self-referential nerds with the […]

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Scannerfunk Wave Of Light By Wave Of Light Sulphur/beggars Banquet By: Eric Greenwood Scanner (a.k.a. Robin Rimbaud) abandons his digital voyeurism and phone-scanning fetish long enough to create his first genuinely accessible dance album. His prolific output in the 1990's was comprised mostly of intercepted snippets of phone conversations backed by sparse electronics and techno […]

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