“As a musician, Luke Wyland wears his classically trained chops on his sleeve. Listen to any track from the catalog of his Portland-based, experimental folk-pop project AU and it’s fairly obvious the guy is an immensely talented vocalist, multi-instrumentalist and composer. Marked with equal parts jazz-influenced and indie rock bombast, each of AU’s first three releases (2007’s self-titled debut, 2008’sVerbs, and 2009’s Visions) featured a talented, small village of collaborators that admirably buoyed Wyland’s seismic musical vision. He knows how to mess with a time signature, his arrangements are almost always impressively grand, and the AU modus operandi revolves around crafting sprawling albums that are both borderline virtuosic and unapologetically dense. ” AU Both Lights album review – Prefix.

“I’m almost positive “Kickball Katy” Goodman is an innocent. For all the posing, quasi-ironic naivete that gets batted around amongst the female indie rock set today (Bethany Constantino of Best Coast is probably the brightest example), Goodman’s endearingly precious persona never seems feigned or detached. As a result, she’s always been a terrific foil for her Vivian Girls band mate Cassie Ramone, who’s unpolished singing voice, guitar work, and aggressively apathetic stage presence are perfectly complimented by Goodman’s cooing, fragile back up harmonies, nimble bass lines, and blissful dreamer aura.

Subtract Ramone from the equation and you get Goodman’s solo project La Sera which, as expected, resembles a gauzy Polaroid of a Vivian Girls’ record on the self-titled 2011 debut, sanding down any punkish, riotgrrl inflections and replacing them with waves of sparse, C86-inspired noise pop. The album was undeniably pretty (and Goodman was up to the task of being a lead vocalist) but still felt slight and ephemeral, clocking in at only 26 minutes. In the end, little room was left for Goodman to slide out of her comfort zone.” La Sera Sees the Light album review at Prefix.

“It’s been extremely intriguing to watch the evolution of Eric Emm and Jesse Cohen’s Brooklyn based, indie dance project Tanlines since their first single “New Flowers” appeared from the music blogosphere ether in 2008. And while, almost immediately, there was discussion regarding the supposed dissonance in sound between Tanlines and Emm and Cohen’s former projects (math rock legends Don Caballero and jittery dance punk outfit Professor Murder, respectively) “New Flowers,” a swift, bongo and synth laden dance tune accented by wordless harmonies, was actually an example of how the duo combined the intricate, jazzy flourishes of Don Cab with the pulsing sheen of contemporary dance music to forge a more cerebral, less ephemeral version of the Tough Alliance.” Tanlines Mixed Emotions album review at Prefix.

“If you’re not being led by a knowledgeable guide, wading into the deep woods of the Internet inhabited by left-field bedroom pop composers, experimental hip-hop producers, avant garde electronic artists, and the many boutique labels that sustain them (vinyl, cassette, and digital alike) can be a daunting task for the uninitiated. It makes perfect sense, then, that we stumbled across Power Animal’s lush sophomore release Exorcism via the Oakland, CA cassette label Crash Symbols, who’s staff was once responsible for the music blog Get Off the Coast, which use to be an integral member of the recently killed Altered Zones network.” Read the rest at Prefix here.

And while it’s safe to say that all the above mentioned bands made their names on combining the innocence of 60′s girl group pop with waves of distortion, punk muscle, and insouciant melancholy, Frankie Rose appears to have bigger ideas on her mind. Flashes of brilliance on Frankie Rose and the Outs (including the delirious Spectorian harmonies of “Little Brown Haired Girls”) pointed out that Rose had no problem writing next-level pop songs that were at times notches above her reverb laden peers, and now her latest release Interstellar embraces influences that were rarely, if ever, associated with her former bands: chilly new wave, jittery post-punk, and Kate Bush inspired art-pop.
The title track, and album opener, showcases Rose’s intent from the word go, with clouds of ambient synth enveloping her angelic vocals which detail swift journeys on “interstellar highways” veiled in “moon dust” before smashing into the wordless, kick drum driven chorus. It’s a thrilling track one that easily possesses symphonic flush and razor sharp pop instincts of classic Echo and The Bunnymen without all the posing, goth rock baggage.

Songs like the Joy Division-lite “Night Swim,” the down-tempo piano driven “Apples for the Sun,” and atmospheric guitar/cello duet “The Fall” provide fascinating examples of Rose’s range that always sound like earned explorations rather than indulgent experiments. However, Interstellar’s heart lies with the centerpiece couplet of the delicate “Pair of Wings” and the pulsing “Had We Had It,” both of which benefit from cavernous production (complete with airy keyboard textures on “Pair” and a chugging, sinewy guitar line on “Had We”) and allow Rose’s blossoming vocal work to soar the highest on the entire album.

Rose managed to wrangle all of her sonic ambitions into tight, imminently listenable 3:00 minute pop songs that make the jangley girl-group sound of her former projects seem like a distant memory. Interstellar is an album bursting at the seams with ideas, and Frankie rose shows no signs of doubt as she makes a bold step forward in her burgeoning solo career.

Frankie Rose – “Interstellar”

Frankie Rose – “Had We Had It” 

Heartless Bastards have made a living working within the confines of blues-influenced hard rock by injecting a slightly more contemporary energy into the muscle of their best songs. There’s little doubt lead singer Erika Wennerstrom can sing the living Christ out of a rock tune, and while it’s usually coupled with the pounding, John Bonham-like kick drums and chugging  (sometimes noodley) guitar riffs deployed as the Bastards primarily weapons, her song writing always seems to possess a boozy, tattered, underground edge that recklessly muddies up the group’s 70s cock rock aura.

I’m thankful because those archetypal stadium god poses would fit awkwardly on a scrappy, Texan band like this, and it’s obvious Paul Westerberg and The Replacements certainly loom just as large as Zeppelin or the Allman Brother’s Band in the Bastards rearview mirror. But while stacking them up against contemporaries like The Low Anthem and The Hold Steady (who have had a lock down on that “America’s Best Bar Band” label for the past decade that) The Bastards easily seem most comfortable plying their trade in what could be considered (in this day and age) bare bones “Rock and Roll,” a genre which, as this century rolls on, seems to be increasingly disenfranchised by both mainstream and alternative culture. (silent majority rock, anyone?)

And now, after the sinew laden, guitar and piano confections of 2006’s All This Time, and the slogging, shit kicking twang of the roided up alt-country on 2009’s The Mountain, Heartless Bastards have found an intriguing middle ground with their latest album Arrow, balancing Wennerstrom’s penchant for crafting beautifully dusty ballads and mid tempo numbers with the limber, hard as nails rawk songs the group can perform in their sleep.

The quiet opener “Marathon” builds to a nice, anthemic finish almost entirely on the strength of Wennerstrom’s hearty vocals, recalling a similar, gorgeous performance on the piano driven album opener “All This Time.” It’s a small gamble to let the album open on such a slow burn, but the one-two punch of the cruising “Parted Ways,” Bowie-like (and simple thesis) “Got to Have Rock and Roll,” manage to clear the brush for the sprawling, rolling, album center piece “Simple Feeling.” Churning percussion work along with guitar parts splayed in every direction (including repeated psychedelic solos that wouldn’t be out of place on Quicksilver’s Happy Trails) makes “Simple Feeling” a thick slab of a song. The finish especially doesn’t spare any expense, with the guitar wail and drums pouring in from all direction as Wennerstrom howls “SIMPLE FEELING! SIMPLE FEELING!”

And, while the album’s second half doesn’t keep the momentum going that peaked with “Simple Feeling,” and has one glaring misstep (the dreary “The Arrow Killed the Beast”) there is still room for solid well-written acoustic tracks like “Skin and Bone” and the beautifully lo-fi  “Low Low Low.” The seven-minute plus “Down in the Canyon” closes out the album with a slow dirge, as Wennestrom paints a grim picture of some sort of end, bearing down with the inevitability of an ominous dust storm in the desert’s distance: “I’ll make a fire/got winter in my bones/out here on my own/and the hour/is getting/late.”

“Down” definitely overstays its welcome but it’s still compelling to see the band try out something this loose and meandering, blatantly flirting with many of the most indulgent tendencies of classic rock only pull back just before reaching the precipice. Heartless Bastards are, and will probably remain, an extremely good scrappy bar band. But, who the fuck said that was a bad thing?

Heartless Bastards – “Simple Feeling”

Then I stumbled across “Wormwood Star” by Kim Phuc in the badlands of sparse MySpace portals. Listening to that track the first time, I honestly didn’t feel like writing a word; I felt like I wanted to do the following things in increasingly insane order: run through a goddamn wall, throw a trashcan through a store front, toss a barrage of molotov cocktails into the ground floor of some faceless corporate headquarters, and finally, start an anarchist collective with the intent of deploying vague plots of domestic terrorism against big business.

Granted, that line of thinking lasted about ten minutes, but the residual effects of the swaggering, white hot rage that radiated from that track lingered much longer. I don’t think I could have asked for a better song to soundtrack a dreary, unemployed Pittsburgh January, and “Wormwood Star” managed to sloppily cut through the bullshit of my rock critic pretensions like a rusty bandsaw. While trying to articulate an opinion on the song, and Kim Phuc in general, all I could muster to a friend of mine was this sentiment: “Dude, that song fucking destroys.”

And now, three years later, I was blown away by the fact that I saw the black, monolithic cover of Kim Phuc’s debut LP, Copsucker, released on Iron Lung Records in late 2011, sitting ominously on the display rack at Mind Cure Records in Polish Hill. The album, patched together from the slew of seven inch singles they accrued over an eight year existence, is a fantastic summary of the punk/post-punk sound lead singer Rob Henry and co. have been cultivating for the better part of a decade. And while band members have rotated over the course of Kim Phuc’s history (Henry and guitarist Ben Smartnick are the only founding members left) new additions guitarist Eli Kasan, bassist Corey Lyons and drummer Tom Payne are all Pittsburgh punk scene veterans from bands like The Mary Celeste, Forward Motion, and Aus Rotten.

With a phalanx of contributors coming from different points on the “punk” spectrum, Copsucker proves to be an eminently listenable, extremely immediate record that still manages to capture the raw energy of Kim Phuc’s intense live shows (full disclosure: seeing them perform live is not for amateurs). The metal/hardcore punk 1,2,3 punch of “Heathens,” “Prostitute” and “Black Triangle” has the group playing at their fastest and loudest, showcasing their lineage from underground heroes of yore (Black Flag, The Germs). The urgent, paranoid post-punk of “Equinox,” “23,” and “Razorblades” however provides a unique dimension to Kim Phuc’s energy: jittery but still pummeling guitar work coupled Henry’s confident songwriting and subtle ear for melody.

But the group still seems most comfortable channeling the sinister proto-punk of Raw Power-era Stooges on the lurching “Weird Skies” and the cocksure menace of “Wormwood Star.” The latter of which recieved a new coat of paint with slightly cleaner production (still not detracting from the song’s live-to-tape feeling grit) and a boost to Henry’s vocals, which illuminates some truly terrifying, Yeatsian lyrics, talking about summoning some unholy creation from the ether to terrorize the world “Second Coming” style: “I have made you from my thoughts/summoned you from the stars/set you loose to tear apart/you’re my wormwood star.”

In the end,  this batch of songs is the definitive document of one of Pittsburgh’s most revered bands. And while the production is a little tighter and the edges are a little cleaner from past releases, Copsucker is nothing less than the soundtrack to a riot, reverberating with the same unstable, white hot blast of punk fury Kim Phuc made their name on.

Buy Copsucker here

Kim Phuc – “Wormwood Star”

Mellowhype’s first full-length BLACKENEDWHITE has proved to be both Odd Future’s latest document of incendiary weirdness and its greatest sonic departure. It’s also the first OF creation produced not by wheezing, wise-beyond-his-years ring leader, Tyler the Creator, but by Mellowhype’s own Left Brain.

While there are touchstones of OF’s now trademarked sound (distorted, sea sick string samples, burping 8-bit synth lines, shockingly misogynistic and violent lyrics) on tracks like “Primo” and “Brain,” Left Brain doesn’t hesitate to use all of the tools at his disposal: the Waka Flocka Flame-inspired gunshot riddled beat on “Gun Sounds” and “Dead Deputy,” the Charlie Brown Christmas sample and R&B hook on “Hell” and the MF Doom-styled jazz piano line of “Loco.”

Hodgy Beats, the rapping half of Mellowhype, does most of the heavy lifting lyrically, but doesn’t turn to the homicidally unhinged shock rap the crew has made their name on. Instead, his flow is airy and youthful, similar to the cocksure insouciance of Wiz Khalifa or Wale, but contains just enough edge to thrive within Tyler’s well established OF aesthetic.

BLACKENEDWHITE is a quality debut for Mellowhype and another striking release for the new princes of the underground in Odd Future, proving they have no intention of resting on their laurels won from a year of very intense, very well-deserved hype.

“Pindrop” opens Black Cobain’s Board Administration debut mixtape Now with some prescient words for, presumably, the east coast hip-hop masses: “Today is a good day for greatness people…we don’t got next we got now.” For followers of the Wale-lead, DC/Northern Virginia label, “now” seems like a slippery concept. “Now” was supposed to be the major label takeover of  Wale’s 2009 release Attention Deficit, an album that sold small and effectively bounced the District’s own go-go funk beat out of the commercial rap picture.

For Alexandria, VA native Black Cobain, newest signee to BA, “now” doesn’t necessarily represent the endless clichés of modern hip-hop that supposedly produce universal acceptance (money, girls, booze, auto-tune, club-ready techno beats, repeat). With a studied passion for the region’s rich heritage of overlooked soul and funk informing the majority of Now’s production, the Nirvana-monikered MC uses the easy flow of late 70’s DC go-go beat to effortlessly deliver sturdy verses tinged with self awareness and just enough thoughtful vigor. 

And while “Pindrop” does introduce Cobain’s first mixtape with some confident boasting, the beat, showered in twinkling guitar whirls that wouldn’t sound out of place on the Dolemite soundtrack, is so relaxed it reveals the quietly knowing, almost cocksure moments latent in Cobain’s best rhymes: “What’s your motivation?/everybody’s got a past/That we all got a past/flow fragile, pardon, you don’t want no broken glass.”

Absent from Now, for the most part, is the spastic double time percussion of 90’s go-go (which Wale famously sampled for “Pretty Girls”) as Cobain sticks mostly to the old school, wah-wah guitar and bass on tracks like “Perception,” “Afraid,” and “The Board.” The last of which shows Cobain at his most confrontational, twisting his liquid flow around devastating couplets (“I got this style notarized/and if they listen closely they know this mine”), subtle dismissals of posturing MC’s (“we don’t socialize/we just organize/we don’t know those guys”) and thesis statements (“I’m not them/they associates, n****/I’m a doctrine”).

In between the soulful throw backs, Cobain tries out a few different styles with varying success. A Neptunes-inflected party jam in “Bottles on Me,” the triumphantly stomping “It’s Cobizzy,” and the ominously glitch-laden “Tune In” all prove to be indelible change-ups, but the cream of the crop comes with closer and mixtape title cut “Now.”

“Now” proves to be the perfect combination of past and present: a slow-burn built on a tumbling horn-sample, simple break-beat and Black Cobain’s perfectly modulated flow. It’s a fitting and intriguing conclusion, especially as Cobain allows his confidence, slightly wavering over the course of 19 tracks, to finally degrade into paranoia (“Now I’m in discussions/ discussions within communities/it started as a dream/but they trying to Martin Luther me”).

All in all, the newest addition to the Board Administration shows his stripes and arrives on the scene exhibiting a maturity and clarity of vision that is practically unmatched among debut mixtapes. Pay attention people: this man is poised to make big moves in the DC/Northern VA scene, and hopefully beyond.

Black Cobain Now Review – Jenesis Magazine 

Big Hurry

Doused in shimmering guitar work and bass riffs, Big Hurry’s Gets Me Low ignites quickly to burn twice as bright for half as long. The short-burst, five-song EP has fiery lead singer Kelly Tobias and arena-ready drummer Dani Buncher unleashing searing performances that continue smolder with each listen. The beautifully anthemic title cut is a keeper, a dynamic indie rocker that effortlessly earns its track-one status. By Patrick Bowman

Greazy Duzit
Mucho Greazy (self-released)

Tongue-twisting emcee Greazy Duzit steps out of the shadow of Pittsburgh-based rap group Shindiggaz with his debut release Mucho Greazy, a hard, heady blend of esoteric street poetics and blistering underground beats. Keeping pace with Greazy’s hardened flow is Shindiggaz’ DJ Thermos, who produced much of the album, crafting dense tapestries of off-kilter samples anchored by varying drum patterns. Standout “The Name of That Tune” has the duo at their razor-sharp best. By Patrick Bowman

Run, Forever
The Devil, and Death, and Me (Solidarity Records)

Run, Forever’s full-length debut, The Devil, and Death, and Me, is a rough-and-tumble rocker, filtering Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run through decades of beer-soaked garage punk and just enough religious imagery to keep the proceedings on the edge of an existential crisis.  And while the track “A Sequence of Sad Events” reduces existence to just that, it possesses the dimensions of a life-affirming anthem, full of throaty calls to action and desperate demands for something more. By Patrick Bowman