“Delicate” and “quiet” aren’t normally adjectives that come within screeching dis tance of Thurston Moore, founding member of Sonic Youth and leading cause of tinnitus for much of the nineties’ Alternative Nation.
Wesley Eisold is a Renaissance man—the former leader of influential hardcore bands American Nightmare/Give Up the Ghost is also a poet who maintains his own publishing house—but his tastes run decidedly to the gothic.
“My past is getting us nowhere fast/ I was never one for taking things slow.” Dave Grohl sings these words late on Foo Fighters’ seventh album, but backs them up throughout.
Too cerebral to be emo, too emotional to be punk, too hardcore to be popular: There are plenty of reasons Thursday has never made the leap from underground adulation to mainstream consecration.
“The Heart Is a Beating Drum” is both the pulsating third song on the Kills’ fourth album, Blood Pressures, and a sort of manifesto for the rawboned Brit-blues duo behind it.
Cake are proud, bearded veterans of the nineties, a bygone era when quirky bands with spoken-word singers could not only find themselves on a major label, but also wind up with a radio hit or two.
GANG OF FOUR
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Yep Roc
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Post-punk nostalgia was all the rage for much of the past decade, as hypemachine mainstays like Interpol, Franz Ferdinand, and Bloc Party borrowed liberally from Gang of Four, nearly canonizing the 30-year-old English quartet in the process. Thankfully, Jon King and Andy Gill—half of the original Gang—won’t settle for being anyone’s [...]