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 […]
Stereolab really has nothing to do with Heck Reckoners, but they’re a vibe and this is one of the chillest grooviest albums of all time.
Speedy Ortiz is a literate, girl-led version of 90s dude-y indie rock.
Happy Valentine’s Day! This is the second album from X, the best band to come from LA’s punk scene in the 1980s (fight me, Black Flag). X wrote literate songs, often sung in slightly off-key unison by their dueling male and female lead singers, supported by guitar work that proved punk didn’t need to be […]
Savages cut two very good punk rock/post-punk albums in the 2010s. “Silence Yourself” is their first. Instrumentally, they’re probably closest to what we’ve been doing. (IMHO, we’ve more range though.)