This super sucks. “My guy” Steve Albini died today of a heart attack at 61, so for this week’s Wednesday album, I’m picking the most groundbreaking album of his most groundbreaking band, Big Black’s Atomizer. Although Albini matured into a thoughtful elder statesman of indie rock, he began as something of a proto-internet troll. Quick […]
This one is a bit bittersweet for me, because on one hand, it is the culmination of a great discography: the seventh album in a career with no bad albums, The Woods makes this punky indie band sound like frickin’ Led Zeppelin, and, with its varied selection of songs (including a ten-minute guitar showstopper), acts […]
Treble.com ran a feature on their top 50 post-rock albums of all time on Monday. The name of the genre is silly and vague, but it came to describe a type of music that tried to take rock to more ambient, cinematic, jazzier, and math-ier places. Its heyday was the 1990s, but bands are still […]
During the early 2010s, my favorite type of music — guitarish rock — was in a slump, but there were still some pearls to find among the Arcade Fire-wannabes with wax mustaches and hurdy-gurdys singing about building the Transcontinental Railroad. One of those pearls came from Cloud Nothings, a group of Cleveland kids who kinda […]
Do y’all like guitars? From the same CBGB scene that made The Ramones and Talking Heads famous, Television was a “punk” band, but only in the most oblique sense. They could play and they could write (still couldn’t really sing). Unlike other guitar epics of the 1970s, there is zero white boy blues shit on […]
In the late 60s and early 70s a bunch of artsy German hippies grew up in a blown out industrial wasteland, contending with the fact that their parents were literal Nazis. Inspired by Hendrix, free jazz, musique concrète, and Stockhausen, and toying with new instruments like synthesizers, they created spacey, inventive, often driving music that […]
In 2024, The Velvet Underground and Nico is the most relevant album released in the 1960s. It is ground zero for indie rock, dream pop, shoegaze, noise rock, and a million other guitar-based genres of music. Brian Eno is quoted saying that the album sold 10,000 copies and spawned 10,000 bands. It was probably the […]
The 2020s has seen a raft of good alt/post-punk music from Dry Cleaning to Squid to Wet Leg. Porridge Radio’s dueling lead vocals over droning organ and spiky guitar feels like The Velvet Underground revisited, but their use of repetition feels new to me. Somehow singer Dana Margolin wrings more emotion out of saying a […]
Pitchfork kinda fucked these guys by giving this album a 10/10 when it was released in 2002. They could never live up to the hype. But they are a really great rock band, and their mix of Sonic Youth’s squall and The Who’s bombast makes for a pretty killer, noisy indie rock album. It’s not […]
A month or two ago, one of the best power trios of the 2000s Screaming Females broke up. This album, produced by my guy Steve Albini, splits the difference between the more anarchic garage noise of their first few albums and the more refined poppier stuff from their last few. It also has a banger […]