If It's Too Loud...

My love for Lady Lamb's music is very well established here. Ripely Pine, from back when she went by Lady Lamb the Beekeeper,   was my favorite album of 2013 , plus I've reviewed two live shows just this year alone .  After  is a bit more accessible than Ripely Pine , but that's not a bad thing. There are still the layers within songs that made me love Ripely Pine , plus multiple tempo changes and complete swerves halfway through a song. But this album feels like something everyone but your most top 40 listening friends could appreciate. Just listen to "Violet Clementine" for an example of this. It just keeps progressively changing from a quirky folk song to a bizarro indie rocker. Plus, if you know anyone that can hear "Billions of Eyes" without instantly loving it, you need to stop talking to that person.  If you haven't, please check out Lady Lamb's After  below.

Hop Along's Painted Shut  is the album that came out of nowhere this year and just floored me. I had heard the name Hop Along before, but until this album was released I had never actually heard them. An obsession with this album slowly blossomed all year, as I kept playing Painted Shut  week after week, long after I grew tired of other releases that came out after it. The true secret of Hop Along is Frances Quinlan's voice. In the same song she'll go from a soft, pretty, fairly standard in indie rock voice, to a more powerful screech that dances right on the line of being too pretty and too harsh. It's the bouncing between beautiful and abrasive that just sucks me in every time. Just listen to "Buddy in the Parade" and you'll see exactly what I mean. Musically, Hop Along land squarely in the 90s inflected indie rock that I'm thrilled is all the rage right now, with jangly, fuzzy guitars that seem to wander around the songs on their own. If you hav...

No Cities to Love has no business being truly great. When a band takes eight years off (and doesn't release an album for ten years), you're usually just happy they're back and touring. Reunion albums are usually filled with songs you have to sit through in between the songs you care about at a live show. But all of No Cities to Love  holds up with everything in Sleater-Kinney's catalog.  "Surface Envy" is a driving force of a song. It's the perfect shout along anthem you wish every band had, which is ironic considering another song on the album is titled "No Anthems." "A New Wave" might be my favorite song on the album. I'm only saying might because the video featuring members of Bob's Burgers  might be influencing me unfairly against other songs. Comeback albums are a dubious prospect, as are any albums from a band that have been around for 20 years. I don't mind waiting ten years between albums if they'll all be ...

Right from the start of album opener "Every Time Katie," you know that this album will be different from the usual David Wax Museum releases. While the Mexican influences are still there and lurking, they are far less prominent than they have been in the past. What you get with Guesthouse  is a band trying something else and knocking it out of the park. When a band breaks through based on their breakout performances at the Newport Folk Festival, you don't really expect them to pull off electronic elements well. But they do by hinting at them just enough. The only time this falters a bit is with "Dark Night of the Heart," which put a little too much of a digital effect on their voices for the chorus. It ends up being as much stronger song live, but I would never fault a band for experimenting a little. By the third track, "Guesthouse," you get a true feel for the album. It's more of a celebratory song that defines David Wax Museum at their finest....

For her 2015 album, I Want to Grow Up , Colleen Green lost some of the lo-fi noise of her previous recordings and went for a more full, produced sound. That can sometimes be the signs of a disaster, and after the first listen, I was a little bit disappointed. A few months later, I stumbled across the title track "I Want to Grow Up," immediately loved it, and was shocked to rediscover it was Colleen Green. Sometimes you need to listen to a song blindly without the artist's back catalog to realize how great it is. I Want to Grow Up  mixes 90s noise with 60s doo wop quite a bit, kind of like a smoother version of Jemina Pearl's solo work. The song "I Want to Grow Up" starts off faurly quietly, and then evolves into the greatest power pop noisy rocker recorded in the past 20 years with an honest to goodness guitar solo. The title of the album is also a recurring theme throughout, with most songs about self improvement and leaving your bad habits aside. The s...

#6 of 2015 is Courtney Barnett's Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit. I can't think of anyone who came seemingly out of nowhere to take over the entire year of music. From discovering her due to her phenomenal cover of The Lemonheads' "Bein' Around" in 2014 , I've become almost completely obsessed with hearing as much of her as possible.  Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit opens with my least favorite song on the album, "Elevator Operator," but immediately hits perfection with the second track, "Pedestrian at Best." It's a breakneck pop rock song that I had no idea anyone was still making. The more time I spend with the album, the more I start to love some of the quieter songs like "Depreston." The whole album is this perfect blend of Liz Phair meets the ferocity of Kurt Cobain and the could care less attitude of Evan Dando. If that sounds appealing at all, you'll love this album, w...

It's impossible to listen to Brown Bird's Axis Mundi  without thinking about the passing of Dave Lamb. The album was written and recorded during his battle with cancer, and there is a sense of darkness and foreboding throughout the album. "Adolescence" is a plodding dark folk song heightened by crashing drums throughout. "Bannerman" might be the most typical Brown Bird song on the album, with it's up tempo Eastern European guitar sound. The duo also let loose their metal influences for the first time on Axis Mundi. "Blood From the Tree" starts off more typically for the band, and then turns into a metal-folk anthem. Even an instrumental song like "Shadrach" takes on a contemplative and resigned feel. Please listen to Axis Mundi below. You should also head over to Brown Bird's Bandcamp where they're once again offering their Christmas album for purchase. 

My number 9 album,  Coming Home,  feels like the summer to me. The album stayed in the stereo of a rental car during a family trip to South Carolina, where it flavored our entire stay.  In my opinion, Leon Bridges' Coming Home  is the best of the current soul revival. It doesn't sound like it's mimicking 60s soul, it sounds like it was recorded in the 60s. Right from the opening song, the title track "Coming Home," it pulls you right in with a sound you might not have realized you love. "Lisa Sawyer" is my personal favorite, and is just this beautiful ballad, complete with these layers of backing vocals throughout. His background singers are Bridges' secret weapon. As with any truly great 60s soul song, it's the background singers you end up singing along to more than the lead. "Flowers" shows off the best of his more uptempo sound. He's already gone from playing clubs in 2015 to setting up a large theater tour for 2016. You can...

When a band releases two albums in the same year, it can be hard to choose your favorite. Since Consumer Complaints came out first, I'll go with that one since it seemed to come out of nowhere. It seems like there's a huge post-punk revival going on right now, with a ton of new bands borrowing heavily from Gang of Four and Joy Division. For some reason, I'm 100% ok with bands doing their best impressions of both Gang of Four and Joy Division, so this has been a stellar year for me. What elevates Shopping above the rest is that they have really nailed the backbeat of early Gang of Four, and have incorporated a less is more aesthetic while still being able to make you dance. Plus, "In Other Words" may be my favorite song of the year. You can stream Consumer Complaints below via Spotify. If you enjoy it, be sure to also check out Why Choose , their second release of 2015.

I don't think I realized how much I was missing noise and bands playing loud just to be loud until I heard the new Metz album. II  is just perfect for what it is. It's just loud and noisy and aggressive while being actual songs.  These days, a lot of what is considered punk is just either a paint by numbers approach where a band mimics the last 30 years of music or it's this whiny emo nonsense that gets played on the radio next to a Taylor Swift song. Also, most noise rock is just pure noise with no song structure or just twiddling with some electronic instruments in what is technically noise but is just boring. II pushes punk into noise and noise into real songs. It's predecessors are Nirvana and Refused's The Shape of Punk to Come. If you listen to either of those for more than pure nostalgia, you'll end up loving this album. It's rare for me to hear an album that makes me wish I was 20 years younger so I could fully appreciate hearing it. I just know ...