A Place To Bury Strangers : Synthesizer

Coming into a new album from Oliver Ackermann’s A Place To Bury Strangers you pretty much know that it’s going to be loud, abrasive, and sprinkled with melodic ear worms under all the aural debauchery. Ackermann is a bit of a sound wizard, creating effects boxes with his Death By Audio effects company. His effects […]

A Place To Bury Strangers : See Through You

Oliver Ackermann’s long running post-punk/shoegaze/noise rock band A Place To Bury Strangers continues to morph and evolve into the perfect screeching, nihilistic sound blast. Guitars that sonically land somewhere between a chainsaw, exploding power grid, and a universe eating itself, while drums and bass keep a constant, robot-like rhythm to march into the apocalypse to. […]

METZ : LIVE AT THE OPERA HOUSE

METZ have established themselves as modern post-punk titans over the course of a decade, making albums as sonically punishing as they are deceptively catchy. Pained, barb wire-wrapped pop structures coated in honey, dipped in broken glass and meticulously pounded into our psyches until we give into the aural assault. The Canadian four-piece released their fourth […]

Peel Dream Magazine : Agitprop Alterna

New York’s Peel Dream Magazine capture the noise and beauty of late 80s Creation Records better than anyone I’ve heard in a long time. The boy/girl vocals interplay, the wall of Big Muff distortion, and the noise rock squall all come together beautifully. Bands like Lush, My Bloody Valentine, Chapterhouse, and Medicine echo in the […]

Segall + Chippendale = Wasted Shirt

It took me many years to get into Ty Segall. I never really heard what everyone else did about the guy. I thought he was pretty prolific, and I gave him credit for being a good songwriter, but for the most part the fuzzed-up garage rock/noise pop trip he was on didn’t do it for […]

A Place To Bury Strangers : Pinned

A Place To Bury Strangers has always been an exercise in pain to my ears. The New York post-punk/noise rock band deal in angst and sonic annihilation and have since their beginning. From their debut self-titled in 2007 to now I’ve attempted to find an in with them, but each time would end up in […]

METZ : Strange Peace

I will admit that I have a bit of a dude crush on the Canadian rock band METZ. There’s just something about their intense brand of noise rock/post-punk gumbo that gets me in the gut. It’s a kind of rush that comes with a special sort of experience. Maybe like jumping out of a plane, […]

No Joy : More Faithful

I can’t remember the first time I heard No Joy. I know it was sometime in 2013 when they had just put out their excellent Wait To Pleasure. Something about that album was immediate and in-the-moment so I was compelled to have it. The guitar and vocal interplay between Jasamine White-Gluz and Laura Lloyd has a […]

Medicine-To The Happy Few

When you hear a song like “Long As The Sun” -the opener on Medicine’s excellent new album To The Happy Few– you don’t think that this is a band that has essentially been stored in moth balls for 18 years. You think you’re hearing The Beach Boys ran through the Jesus and Mary Chain warpulator. […]