My girlfriend calls it old people music; I call it brilliant. Old-school punk/folk troubadour Billy Bragg dropped Mr. Love and Justice this week, and while his style has mellowed out since 1983’s Life’s a Riot with Spy vs. Spy, there’s no denying him his place among the best rock lyricists. Bragg has always walked a line between the personal and the political, and Mr. Love and Justice is just that. While the record tends to steer towards accounts about fidelity, Bragg still finds time for a socio-political jab here and there. [more]

Just in case everyone here hasn’t heard yet: I am crazy-nuts for the Jesus and Mary Chain. 2008 is the year of the Mary Chain for me. So as I fill out the Reid brothers’ discography in my collection, I’ve also been checking out anything and everything that references them as an influence. I reviewed the Magnetic Fields’s newest album not long ago, the appropriately-titled Distortion, and while for Merritt’s band it was a tangent, bringing the noise into their theatrical world, I soon found that for the Raveonettes it’s a way of life. [more]

Forays into absurdist music can be frightening, jarring, unappealing and disturbing. Or they can be eye-opening, evangelical experiences. Mitch Hedberg said it best when talking about his death metal band: "People either loved us or hated us. Or they thought we were okay." Bands like Man Man can be polarizing to the average music fan, inspiring fierce loyalism or general distaste. Or they might just not even hit the register and render the listener to be so far removed from what they're attempting that the listener's brain refuses to form an opinion about them. [more]

I remember first hearing about Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin. It was purely related to the band’s ridiculous name, and I never listened to ‘em. So I missed their debut Broom on the first pass. Their name started popping up again in blogs and whatnot; apparently they had a new album on the way. I checked out a tune. Then I watched a clip, something that appeared to be a homemade promotional vid for the new album (here). [more]

In the 7th grade I must have read Michael Azerrad’s book Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana three or four times. First it was a borrowed copy from a friend’s older brother, and then I had my own coveted little copy. This was at the height of my Nirvana obsession, so while the rest of my classmates top priorities were the new Foxy Brown single and how many goals Eric Lindros had scored the night before, I would be doodling the Seattle trio’s simple logo on folders and pondering whether I should get a flannel shirt or not. [more]

Hardcore is a difficult genre to exist in. Fickle fans, guaranteed financial failure and quick stylistic turnovers lead to a short life expectancy for bands. The majority of bands that experience any success burn brightly for a time and fade away quickly or just stagnate, rarely releasing more than a handful of quality records. It’s exceedingly rare for a band to grow and improve in an environment crowded with the prevalent “I liked their first 7-inch better” mentality, but when dealing with Blacklisted, these trends simply do not apply. [more]

In a recent interview, Bob Mould revealed how, in his time with Hüsker Dü, everyone was scared of him. If District Line was your first experience with Mould’s musical output, you might find this hard to believe. That’s because the music contained within it exudes a remarkable calm and confidence and if his joyful playing of a few Hüsker songs in recent years is any indication, an acceptance of that turbulent past.

2005’s Body of Song marked Mould’s return to the guitar after he traded in his six-string for the world of eletronic music. [more]

The Magnetic Fields, while having been around the indie circuit for over 15 years, haven’t gotten much love around the ‘Org, with no reviews in the archives. Plus, when a news post here told of their new album’s stream, it was barely acknowledged and those who did were mostly negative. (. [more]

Too often i find myself wondering who's playing backups on albums these days. Solo releases are splattered with guest performances, auxiliary musicians, extra instrumentation, etc. al. While it's nice to know who's playing what and demonstrates humility on the part of the artist, I miss the the egocentric days of the singer/songwriter era. [more]

Life Long Tragedy’s 2004 debut LP, Destined for Anything, was very much a product of its time. Double-bass drum reliance, weird metalcore moments, a smattering of cliché “posi” lyrics and an overuse of gang vocals marred what was otherwise an enjoyable, if not unoriginal, hardcore release. In 2006, after signing to Deathwish, Inc., LLT released a split with Final Fight, which saw both bands heading in a Modern Life Is War-esque direction, with slower, grinding songs and a more personal and profound lyric style. [more]