Among humanity’s more limiting foibles is our perpetual need to categorize, to label, to place things into boxes. I assume this is some leftover remnant of our evolutionary selves, the need to discern who or what is a threat in order to survive. This persistent obsession with labels survives today, less out of the need [...]
Ringing in the New Year at Brooklyn's newest nightclub & indie rock venue, Elsewhere. “What is elsewhere?” I asked. Just a week or two into my internship at PopGun Presents, I had heard Jake, Rami, and Dhruv say this word at least ten dozen times. I sat with Jake and Dhruv at Saint [...]
Yumi Zouma photo by Aaron Lee It's only been a year since New Zealand’s Yumi Zouma debuted with Yoncalla, a polished batch of ten disco-infused indie pop tracks. But the Kiwi quartet have already returned with follow-up Willowbank, a subdued collection of dreamy songs that explore the fundamentally modern confusion between perception and reality. [...]
If Alvvays’ eponymous first record articulated a quintessentially modern fear of commitment, then newly released follow-up Antisocialites captures the next logical step, which is an ambivalence about it. The Toronto band gained momentum in 2014 with their self-titled debut, a nine-song batch of whimsical but sharp tracks that bemoaned romance as a twenty-something in the [...]
Photo by Jacqueline Harriet Brooklyn power-pop outfit Charly Bliss deals in the stylings of nineties’ girl-fronted power pop bands: sugary sweet vocals layered over Warped Tour-worthy pop punk riffs. They haven’t escaped comparisons to bands like Veruca Salt or Letters To Cleo, and they won’t here either. But this niche of music - [...]
“It’s not easy, just being human, and the lights and the smoke and screens,” sings Sam Herring on Future Islands’ latest record, The Far Field. It isn’t. Our lives are a sloppy amalgamation of highs and lows, love and hate, obsession and apathy. In essence, this record faces this reality head on: it’s a devastatingly [...]
Hartford emo band Sorority Noise released their third full length record, You’re Not As _____ As You Think, this week. It’s so self-aware it’s like the Scream of emo records. It’s formulaic as far as pop punk records go, but the band almost points it out ironically, trying to hedge out a comfortable space in [...]
Below The House is the latest offering of musician Thom Wasluck, who has been recording and performing as Planning For Burial since 2005. Romantic and devastating all at once, the record is about nostalgia and the pain of loss - a prime example of how an artist can meddle with various genres to add emotional nuance [...]
DC indie punk band Witch Coast unexpectedly dropped a new EP, Devil Vision, on Friday. Their latest incarnation since 2015's full length Burnt Out By 3PM, they put this out on vocalist Jon Weiss's own Babe City Records. Witch Coast's relevance rests on their spot-on interpretation of early adulthood ennui, born on their earlier releases [...]
“Art is inherently political. Art informs politics and politics inform art,” said Priests frontwoman Katie Alice Greer in December when her band played a surprise show at Alphaville in Bushwick. This was post-election, and Greer was comforting a distressed audience, but her stance wasn’t surprising; that America is, in reality, a dark place isn’t news [...]
