If you don't know who Bruce Springsteen is do yourself a favor and check out “Jungleland,” and brace yourself. One of the most influential songwriters in the past 40 years or so, Springsteen is best known for his records released in the mid '70s to early '90s. Though he fell from the lime light in subsequent years, he has continued to write some incredible tunes filled with desperation and hope. His latest effort “Wrecking Ball” follows similar themes that can be found on other Springsteen classics; small town heros, zeros and the bittersweet of life. The opening track “We Take...
Back when At The Drive-In was putting out records and going out on tours they were about the most exciting thing in rock 'n' roll. It almost felt like as they broke up rock took a turn toward nostalgia with bands like The Hives and the White Stripes kicking out throw back style jams, a staunch opposite to At The Drive-In's progressive stance. Not to say that all those bands didn't contribute something to the history of rock music. When the Mars Volta hit the scene it was an exciting moment. The forward thinking members of At The Drive-In push their boundaries to new levels. Now on its sixth...
Henry Daggs has a road-worn voice filled with back roads and highways, and all the people and places that he sees along the way. His songs carry the stories wisdom of onewho has lived a different life in a different city, a step in the evolution of who he is now. With a punk overtone through out his songs, Daggs relays a certain duality — a tired restlessness for the roadand a longing for home. This is exemplified on the track “Sandusky,” as Daggs recounts a unplanned diversion on state route 4 keeping him from his love at the end of the road. He boils the whole thing down, telling...
Album Name: Believeland Composer: Mild Mannered Record Label: Mildmanneredhq.com (National) These indie pop rockers trade in the twinkling and chimes commonly found in the genre for big hooks and bold '90s alternative rock guitars and a belting front woman. The band kicks off the record with “Back Home” which has a big rock build up that takes a surprise turn into a verse and chorus dynamic, though the track does pick up into some pretty impressive vocals parts. The guitars become a washing wall of sound at the songs dramatic conclusion. The following two tracks take a similar a...
Album Name: We Own The Sun Composer: The Heights Band Record Label: None (n/a) Akron's The Heights Band play a grungy stoner rock through and through. Led Zepplin influenced guitar riffs drone through bluesly wailing vocals. Tempo changes occur with wild abandon as new riffs topple predecessors. Despite the massive tones the band manages to steer clear of well-worn trappings of bands in the genre, opting to let classic rock riffs and tasteful solos work as bridges. Just as you feel like you have a grip on what the band is about with the first two tracks in the record, they go into ...
First things first: This record is a 45. This wouldn’t be a huge deal if it weren’t for the fact that no one has a spacer for a 45 lying around. Once I located one, the building anticipation to listen to it raised the expectation bar significantly. Exploding Lies play a sludgy and loose barroom blues. That kind of rock ‘n’ roll that you imagine hearing at that down-the-alley bar where the patrons are shifty and the music is ceremoniously loud, while the band plays with a nonchalant attitude. Side A of this record kicks off with “Cleveland Blues #1,” a heavy stoner rock riff o...
“Nostalgic without the burden of sentimentality” is the best way to describe the music of Dolly Rocker Ragdoll. Like Elvis Presley on acid, it is both familiar and fresh, classic and modern — though Andy, the man behind the music, sees it much simpler than that. This hard-to-pin-down style is likely a result of Andy’s varied musical influences, which range from blues and classic country to the Misfits, 13th Floor Elevator to Dax Riggs. The overriding style is the blues, something that he points out as not being very divergent, as the similarities between the blues and punk rock are ...
There's Music InThar Hills Smokestack is the guitar player and the Foothill Fury is Smokestack, together they form the wandering one-man band that is Smokestack and the Foothill Fury. Playing an traditional hills blues, he comes off as a man to be reckoned with, like a mountain. Solitary, yet unmovable. As a performer it must be a sight to be hold, this hollering man stomping and flopping sweat over his beat little kit. If you can really call a kick and snare a kit. A sight to be seen for sure, a man doing six things at one and keeping a steady beat the whole time and just rolling through....
Ol' Tony Bones and crew ain't making a reviewers job easy with Viva Le Vox's latest, “Dirt For Sale.” The boys should be applauded for establishing a Frankenstein sound, a conglomeration of ragtime, jazz and punk. This is what makes reviewing it so difficult, as nailing down a reference point to form a basis of comparison in order to give the reader a sense of the sound without using the sense of hearing. Certainly lines of delineation can be found, but they become skewed and cloaked behind some other element in the songs that the connect because. The easiest comparison to make would...
This guy's wedding secured Steve Hallo the top spot!In 2002, Tracy Corpus began operating Progressive Daters, Inc. after reading about the events and going out to Chicago to check one out. “I brought the idea back home and improved on it,” Corpus said, explaining the inception of her company. In 10 years of operation, the company has received confirmation of 178 couples who met at an event and later got married. Do the math: That’s more than one a month for the past decade. Progressive follows the format of speed dating, where each participant has three minutes to chat, then they m...
Containing 21 tracks, Guided By Voices’s latest effort seems a bit long. It’s not a concept record, there actually doesn’t even seem to be much of a common theme in the record at all, in lyrical content or musical composition. The hodge-podge flow of the record gives the feeling that the songs aren’t quite fully developed. Coupled with the band’s trademark lo-fi recording technique — though they did employ some modern practices at moments — the record sounds more like a demo than a cohesive effort. For people unfamiliar with the band, this might not be the best record to acqu...
A terrific winter storm moved across Northeast Ohio the night we —staff photographer Jeremy Aronhalt and I — were to embark on an expedition to hunt for the legendary elusive beast. With parts of the Snow Belt receiving up to a foot of snow, the trip was cursed with a sense of doom well before we even began to venture out, a curse I fear might still linger. Initially the trip was undertaken with a jovial air, but as the reality of the situation presented itself, the fun seemed to be stripped from the assignment, weighed down like an ice-covered tree limb. This was supposed to be a fact-...
Mixing time-tested rock ‘n’ roll with country licks, this Pittsburgh four-piece plays some blazing jams. If Motörhead was bred in the Midwest instead of England. this is pretty much what they would sound like: blazing riffs, gruff vocals on top of aggressive. Fans of gritty slice-of-life songs filled with boozehounds, jaded women and other-side-of-the-tracks stories will appreciate the sincerity found in Rustbelt Homewreckers songs....
So here’s the story. I once went to check out All Dinosaurs at this jazz club in Brooklyn, which was kind of weird because they aren’t a jazz band at all. I got there late, but being the cool dudes that they are, they weren’t mad. We ended up going to this party at a warehouse that was converted into practice space for circus performers. Totally bizarre. The point of the story illustrates the band fairly well, as they disregard clichés while burning a rock ‘n’ roll trail through unfamiliar terrain, harking back to a time when music was exciting, fresh and dangerous....
This group of young men from that dirty city of Pittsburgh plays a pop-centric indie rock peppered with tight harmonies as it treads across quasi-experimental ground. It’s a well-worn experiment, though, like a sophomore distilling wood or performing some other time-honored scientific inquiry. Which makes sense considering the members are still in high school. This is most boldly displayed on the A-side track, as the band bounces across a familiar sonic landscape. The real cut on this record is the B-side, “King Street,” which opens up with a quasi-off-kilter keyboard lead that break...
This Cleveland five-piece has been kicking around for a few years now, putting out folk-pop songs with massively lush musical compositions. Their polished sound and well-crafted songs have garnered the group plenty of attention. The retaining walls are poised to break, as the band is at the point where it can hardly be restrained any longer. Photo: Luca Venter Photography ...
Kellogg plays folk with a heavy traditional country tinge. His deep baritone and finger style sound like it emanates from the front porch of a farmhouse — which makes sense, because he lives on a farm in Ohio’s Amish country. Looking like a fire-and-brimstone preacher with a twinkle of mischief in his eyes, it’s hard to take his salt-of-the-earth tunes as anything but genuine. ...
This is the third record put out by Youngstown rockers Asleep and this one was recorded and mixed by Steve Albini — yeah, that Steve Albini who has worked with Nirvana, the Pixies, and Iggy Pop and the Stooges. If that testament to Asleep's ability to craft some serious jams isn't enough of an enticement to check “Unpleasant Companion” out, it's hard to say what else is. The group's high-energy indie rock is well represented on their latest record, which captured the band's raw live sound on two-inch analog tape, giving the listener a taste of their live sets. Unlike other records tha...
Canton-based painter and outsider artist Marcy Axelband’s reserved demeanor is in stark contrast to her bold artwork: She chooses to communicate concisely, allowing her paintings to speak for themselves. And what they have to say could fill volumes with their vibrant colors and Dostoevskian characters who run the gamut of human emotions. Axelband began painting after being encouraged to take up the craft by an artist friend. Her first work started when she hung a large canvas in a second bedroom of her Chicago home. Because she had no formal training, her process was initially guided b...
Laundromat patrons, men contemplating their own demise, junkies, lost souls and broken young men: These are the characters that populate the songs of Viva Le Vox, and these are the lives they lead. These glimpses into unseen worlds are set against a backdrop of sleazy Dixieland jazz. In between chopping wood at his brother’s Pennsylvania home, Viva Le Vox songwriter/guitarist/singer Tony Bones tells Buzzbin that early jazz singers, gypsy jazz and old New Orleans funeral marches, along with ’70s punk rock like The Clash, inform the band’s sound. Bones says that when he’s writing s...
