Please Remain Calm has its own gravity. Technically, I’m supposed to have put down my thoughts on the DIKEMBE record already, which is quite good, but Please Remain Calm crowds out everything else floating around it inside my skull. With a few exceptions (“Ballots/Stones”, “War On A Feeling” and “Jerry Rumpspringer”) Hostage Calm didn’t land [...]

A more nimble OFF WITH THE HEADS, or a clumsier LAWRENCE ARMS. There are RIYLs. LATTERMAN is in there, somewhere, like a haunting, watchful shadow. Those RIYLs are mostly right. Cande Ru Las Degas (talk about a title that throws the curve on the spell check) sounds like the next logical step from the band [...]

SAVE ENDS rolls a natural 20 on Strength Vs. Will! (That’ll be the only exasperating bit of gamer hyperbole here. Promise.) Independent of the World of Warcraft and Dungeons and Dragons references, which nets you less than you’d think, Strength Vs. Will EP is an old school emo record. I mean Vagrant circa 2003 or [...]

It’s January 2008. It’s been snowing since October 2007 and ain’t stopping any time soon. There’s noise about this record called The Senor And The Queen, but mostly about track 2, “Wherefore Art Thou, Elvis?” I think I found “…Elvis?” on a Canadian music compilation. (MuchMusic? I could be completely wrong.) It was the only [...]

If you want to feel old, take a deep breath and repeat after me: Caution was 10 years ago. If you want to feel older still, inhale again and grapple with this: Rise and Epitaph are becoming less distinguishable in content these days. They both release music from bands with haircuts imported from Japan’s most [...]

A record like this means WHITE LUNG has nothing to apologize for. Sorry, by WHITE LUNG is a very concise record. It gets in and gets out in 19 minutes. The way I tend to listen to Sorry is in transit. I’m not in one place or another, and because of the repeat all functionality [...]

Black Widow by BURNING LOVE is two songs long (with a total running time of 6:11), neither of which are named Black Widow. Presumably, the title refers to the lyric “black widow/blade of ‘em all” at the “Karla”, the song on side A. It’s apparently about a serial killer. I think? It’s unclear, but BURNING [...]

PART TWO of an insanely long conversation with Patrick Kindlon of Deathwish artists SELF DEFENSE FAMILY. We pick up the interview during James’ withering examination of song lyrics, whether being ‘mysterious’ as a band works in the age of social networking, and generally whether or not Kindlon is an jackass who simply can’t help but crap [...]