Modern Skirts peddle a brand of pop that’s uncommon, one that blissfully recalls 70s AM pop, one that acknowledges it’s okay to make music for fun, even if it there’s no deep artistic statement of personal pain or political anger. The vast majority of the songs on Catalogue are heavy on piano and light […]

Nat Baldwin has come up with a concept that hadn’t occurred to me yet. All of the sounds on Lights Out are created either by voices or Nat’s upright double bass. He bows, plucks, taps, and scratches his bass to make all of the musical backing to his Yorke-esque vocals. The results […]

The Hotel Alexis is really a vehicle for singer/songwriter and band founder Sydney Alexis, and The Shining Example Is Lying On The Floor is the band‘s debut and part of the freshman class at new independent label Broken Sparrow Records. The music is quiet, slow, aching, heartbroken, and beautiful. Each song tells a […]

DCfC are back with their fifth full-length, and their first for major label Atlantic. The larger budget doesn’t really seem to have had any effect on the Death Cab’s sound, but I think it’s impossible to hear this album without looking at it from a slightly different angle than before. The album winds […]

With his brother Faris, Salim Nourallah was half of the imaginatively named Nourallah Brothers. He was also the lead singer of the Elvis Costello-inspired Happiness Factor, and has been Rhett Miller’s touring bassist. His second solo LP, Beautiful Noise is an album of pleasant, quiet, singer/songwriter-oriented pop music crafted almost entirely by Salim […]

Fountains of Wayne have been around for 10 years now, so even if they only have three proper albums, it’s about time for the compilations to start drifting in. This one consists of 26 B-sides and rarities, plus two newly recorded tracks to lure FoW completists. The songs are mostly originals, but there […]