Meeting of Important People’s 2009 self-titled debut release was a sketchbook of small details and stolen moments, stitched together as lyrically impressionistic vignettes and set against too many perfectly cultivated harmonies to count. The high points (“Mother’s Pay More” and “I Know Every Street”) offered glimpses of a dreamworld populated by desperate youth and blood thirsty babes, detailing the lost nights [...]
Entries Tagged as ‘Album Review’
July 15, 2010
The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion @ Diesel, 7/15, Now I Got Worry Reissue
The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion are six years from their last release and about 14 years removed from the eye of the storm they created. After the group’s initial three record output in the early 90′s that focused on fusing noise rock, hip-hop drum patterns and delta blues together by any means necessary ending with [...]
June 8, 2010
Horse or Cycle – “Flood Season” Album Review
Within Pittsburgh’s stable of underground rock bands, there seems to be a handful of factions that have organically formed. These factions are by no means militant (nearly all of the bands in the scene appear to be friends or at least friendly with each other) but anyone paying attention to Pittsburgh’s musical output can certainly [...]
May 19, 2010
Tobacco – “Maniac Meat” Album Review
Tom Fec, a.k.a Tobacco, is from Pittsburgh but he isn’t from Pittsburgh. The 98′ Hampton High School grad isolates himself so significantly from any tangible sense of location that it’s hard to slap a Steel City label on his music. His MySpace page formerly stated he was from “Rural Western PA/Vietnam.” Granted that is one [...]
April 26, 2010
Shindiggaz Mixtapes: “Prime Time Lineup” and “Saturday Morning Special”
The rotating band of Pittsburgh-based MC’s and producers known as Shindiggaz said hello to 2010 armed only with shit-eating grins and two pitch-perfect debut projects: Prime Time Lineup and Saturday Morning Special, an absurdly hilarious couplet of mix tapes literally busting at the seams with nostalgic beats mined from late eighties-early nineties television theme songs. Prime Time [...]
April 22, 2010
The Ceiling Stares and the Spirit of Analog
The Ceiling Stares, Pittsburgh’s newest underground rock heroes, embrace the lo-fi movement in the correct manner. Less-than-polished, analog-sounding recording techniques shouldn’t be used to mask the deficiencies of the band that utilizes them, nor should they be employed because the current wave of indie music trends indicate lo-fi’s (supposed) importance. The rough, distorted haze of [...]
April 17, 2010
Ayatollah Jaxx Hello Hip-Hop Album Review
The Pittsburgh hip-hop scene may not be the biggest in America, or have the highest profile. Even in the Northeast, the notoriety of the city’ s hip-hop culture has surrounded mostly Girl Talk , Boaz, and Wiz Khalifa, but not many others. Local MC Jack Wilson recently said to me that while Pittsburgh may be [...]
March 24, 2010
summer-winter – Alone is Yes Album Review
Spend enough time listening to WYEP in a given week and chances are, at one time or another, you will be handed a large, healthy fix of boring, listless adult contemporary folk. This isn’t so much a criticism as much as a fact of life: for every amazingly peculiar Tom Waits track (a striking thing [...]
March 10, 2010
The Seven Fields of Aphelion Debut Release – Periphery
The Seven Fields of Aphelion steps out from the shadows (in a manner of speaking) of Tobacco and Black Moth Super Rainbow to release Periphery, out now on Graveface Records. An angelic album of ambient moods and textures, impressionistic, sweeping and intimate in the same breath, Periphery personifies dream-like. As Aaron Jentzen mentioned in his [...]
February 26, 2010
Colonizing the Cosmos Album Release Show @ Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, 2/26
Even in the coddled, closed off loveliness of Pittsburgh’s bustling music scene, things aren’t exactly handed to young musicians looking to make a name for themselves. To self release an album and tour subsequently is, in and of itself, a massive undertaking. But, in terms of the obstacles facing an up and coming band as [...]
