Blogs

  Angsty synth-heavy indie pop At their best, Camera2 make beautifully layered, impossibly catchy, dancefloor-ready synth-pop. Songs like “Appetite” and “Freak Show,” the first two on their new EP, reveal the band’s bright and infectious grooviness. In both of...

  Sexy synth-rock. Kansas synth rockers Noise FM offer up a charged, provocative album that would be most at home in a dingy underground club. The album is high energy throughout, with dominant, grooving basslines and super catchy choruses and lines, all with...

  A folk album that will mend your broken heart. Peggy Sue has been around for the past ten years, in which they have undergone a few name changes, released multiple LPs, and toured with a lot of popular artists emerging from England. Despite all of this, the...

  A synthy, upbeat indie rock album For those who love synthesizers, bumpin‰' beats, a small dose of guitars, and males who have decent voices that can carry a tune, look no further than Gardens and Villa‰'s album, Dunes. The album is an easy listen, and will...

  The National on Xanax The artists formerly known as We Are Augustines kick of their new record ready to fill some stadiums and touch some teenaged hearts. Think of everything you like about the National, the spacious, swelling instrumentation, the...

  Shoegaze, psych, mellow Deerhunter with a little Arctic Monkeys Brooklyn based band, Invisible Days, has released their self-titled EP with six new tracks. The band, who has released two singles and one other EP, plays very accessible shoegaze, chill and psych...

  Showcasing some of Minnesota‰'s finest Twinkie Jiggles, also known as Sean McPherson, is a Minnesotan bassist who has been a key player in the Twin Cities Hip-Hop industry for years. His latest creation, Too Big To Fail, has brought together a wide array of...

  A Soulful, Bluesy, Jazzy, Old School Sound Former contestant on NBC‰'s The Voice, Jessica Childress has such a powerful voice drawing comparisons to soul legends like Diana Ross. She takes this sound and expresses it in rock, blues and jazz settings, in...

  Another Run of the mill “blues-rock‰” duo It seems that in recent years, any guitar/drums duo playing some form of raw rock music is inevitably compares to The White Stripes and The Black Keys and labeled as either garage rock, blues rock or blues-punk. Such is...

  Funky, Soulful, Electronic, and Dance-inspiring Maya Vik has hit a perfect balance between her own unique sound and years of inspiration reaching back to the 1970s and 1980s. On It is funky with fun bass lines and colorful instrumentation. The album‰'s second...

  Angry Arcade Fire on acid Reminiscent of the aura of “Reflektor‰” but transcending in the Rocky Horror Picture Show universe, Electric Order manages to be confusing and appealing in the same riff. Originating in Seattle and dominated by a guitar god, Atomic...

  Garage goes lo-fi What do you get when you cross San Francisco, a garage band, and a synth? A little surprisingly, this band is no joke. POW! packs listeners with a punch, proclaiming a “natural Doppler effect‰” through their songs. While not quite your run of...

  Girl-rocker in love. If you‰'ve ever strongly related an 80s montage of a teenage girl getting ready for a cute date, Molly Thomason is right for you. This 19-year-old Canadian has butterflies in her stomach and crushes on her mind. She‰'s sounds like a fizzy...

  After making a name for himself producing for some of the biggest names in ‰underground‰' hip-hop, such as Joey Badass, Talib Kweli, and and Curren$y, Lee Bannon could have easily just become another boom-bap producer with a secret penchant for more aggressive...

  For being tagged with the unfortunate genre descriptor of ‰post-rock‰', a genre so often defined by its swelling crescendos into explosive climaxes, Mogwai, on their latest effort, very much lack the huge eruptions that someone would have expected from the...

  Music you‰'d find in 80s John Hughes movies Austin based band The Black and the White Years provide a combination of indie rock and electro pop vibes in their album Strange Figurines. Strange Figurines manages to flow seamlessly from one song into another while...

Minutia Sundays LAST.FM Column Description This ain’t no radio show. This is me pouring my blood, sweat, tears, and various other bodily fluids onto a Word document. It’s a window into my brain full of noise, sappy lyrics, pretty guitars, and unfulfilled Emma Watson...

  Harsh takes on old classics This is not Nina Simone. These may be Nina Simone songs, but they are nowhere even close to what you would recognize as the legendary singers originals. Completely redone by avant rockers Xiu Xiu, they are now stripped down, harsh,...

  Rocks meets electro California rock band Young the Giant manages to keep things fresh in their sophomore album Mind Over Matter. As with their debut album, Sameer Gadhia‰'s vocals bring something different to each song found in Mind Over Matter. From the the...

Old-timey Rock and Roll, like really, really old-timey Full of grit and grime, but not without a certain flair for showmanship, JD Wilkes & The Dirt Daubers harken back to a golden age when rock was in it‰'s infancy and the likes of Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl...

Still takin‰' care of business The lead single from Capital Punishment alum Mac DeMarco‰'s upcoming record Salad Days, “Passing Out Pieces‰” hints at a more reflective, pensive direction for indie rock‰'s class clown. Behind massive synth chords, Mac muses on the toll...