SIGHTLINES- SUMMER EP

Sightlines are a local pop-punk band featuring the songs of Eric Axen (also of Hermetic and formerly of Painted Youth, who have both been featured on the blog before!) and this is their first EP! It smokes. Not "smokes" in the "riffage" or metallic sense of the verb but more in the sense that this is 100% efficient and catchy pop-punk that wastes no time fucking around, unless that fucking around constitutes fun. Also this is not the cheesy, leather-jacket-ramones-shirt-pink-converse kind of pop-punk but more like Eric's Trip trying incredibly hard to sound like Jawbreaker. Anyway, the songs rule and will be stuck in your head just like a new crush.

GET IT NOW!!!

OLD POSTS

I've been lazy and since I don't upload any of these albums myself, most of them seem to have been taken down from mediafire. I was just going to discreetly re-up all of them... but the number kept getting bigger and I don't want to sit at my computer all day. So I'm just going to leave this here and let people comment if they want something re-upped that has been taken down.

p.s. google it first! someone else probably uploaded it!

THE MUSIC OF KATIE CRUTCHFIELD

About two years ago I discovered a band called PS Eliot. It was lo-fi pop-punk with some great melodies but it had that indescribable WOW! factor that you're always secretly hoping for when first hearing a band's music. Over the next few months I found out that the source of these songs was a one-woman pop-genius named Katie Crutchfield. In addition to the demo, EP and two LP's by PS Eliot, who recently disbanded, were an album by The Ackleys, a demo LP by Bad Banana, And a split cassette/LP by her current solo project Waxahatchee. It's all great. Her sense of melody for vocals and guitar, and how those two can feed off of each other is astounding. Not to mention the number of songs!!!

If you like anything from Guided by Voices to The Promise Ring to Jawbreaker then this is probably something you'll dig!

BAD BANANA

PS ELIOT 


WAXAHATCHEE

ALEX CHILTON- LIKE FLIES ON SHERBERT

Alex Chilton is awesome. If you enjoy plain old rock music or some really amazing songwriting then you owe it to yourself to get into this man and his odd body of work. The back story that everyone is maybe familiar with goes something like this:

A teenage Chilton somehow lands himself a job as the guitar player in the 60's one-hit-wonders The Box Tops and ends up singing on their biggest hit, that band splits and Chilton befriends fellow songwriter Chris Bell. After awhile they gather two other musicians and form the now legendary Big Star. They write and record two of the greatest and most influential power-pop albums of all time but no one hears them and no one who does seems to care enough. The band splits sometime in the early 70's, Chris Bell becomes a junkie and ends up killing himself while Chilton spends the rest of the decade in a permanent state of depression and intoxication. He regroups with a former Big Star bandmate to record some songs for a new album as The Sister Lovers (the two of them were dating a set of sisters) but it ends up being released as a Big Star album entitled Third, which the label thinks will yield more interest for the album. It doesn't and the album flops, which is no surprise to Chilton at this point. It would go on to be the most lauded and influential of The Big Star LP's but at the time it was just another failure in an ever-expanding list. Shortly after that, Chilton went back to getting fucked up on a permanent basis and somewhere in the haze decided to do his first solo album, Like Flies on Sherbert. A few years later, Chilton became an in-demand producer for new-wave and punk bands and finally earned the long-overdue praise for the material he penned with Big Star. An untouchable cult-figure from the mid 80's on, Chilton enjoyed critical success and unwavering support from the independent music community until his death a few years ago...

But this album... oh boy. One critic said it was the worst album ever made. People hated it's amateurish production and incredibly sloppy playing but listening to it now, you get to hear a power-pop album that predates lo-fi, indie-rock and alt-country by about twelve years. I think it's great and so did Chilton. He said it was made during the worst period of his life but it somehow managed to be a fun reminder of that time instead of the drug-addled mess everyone made it out to be. Decide for yourself I guess.

HERE

TEENAGE COOL KIDS- QUEER SALUTATIONS

Poppy, catchy, raw, clever, bittersweet... just a few adjectives to describe this record. This band is hard to classify exactly because they combine a lot of influences that aren't incredibly distinct from one another when combined in the way this band is capable of. Superchunk, Guided by Voices, late 70's power-pop... Those are what I hear anyway... maybe some garage rock too but I hate that shit so I pretend it's not there. The whole thing easily sounds like it could have come out of North Carolina in 1994 but instead it's Denton, Texas in 2007. Oh and obviously it has cool guitar parts. Why else would I listen to it?

HERE

SLOAN- ONE CHORD TO ANOTHER

If you're from Canada then you either a) don't like Sloan and have been forced to listen to them by every rock station and music-outlet in the country or b) really love Sloan and wish more people took the time to actually listen to their records! Obviously I'm a 'b'...

This is their third album and first big commercial album in Canada, probably because one of its singles went on to be a popular muchmusic video. Our national media has always supported this band and although those decisions often seem arbitrary (Nickelback anyone?) this is one of the few cases where the powers that be actually supported a bunch of really legit guys who just wanted to make power pop for ever and ever and ever and ever. If you like the sounds of Big Star filtered through some early 90's indie sensibilities then this is the ticket! Their previous outing, Twice Removed, is also phenomenal.

HERE

TEENAGE FANCLUB- BANDWAGONESQUE

This is powerpop. Powerpop that does not try to do anything new or exciting with the style. Its just a bunch of guys who really like said genre and decided that instead of trying to change the world or make a musically revolutionary statement, they would just write and record a bunch of songs. Needless to say, it feels a lot bigger than that but really, I don't see how they could have imagined this record going where it did... Mostly of critical significance because SPIN said it was the best album of 1991. I still agree that this is way better than Nevermind but we all know how most people feel about that

HERE

GENTLEMAN JESSE & HIS MEN- S/T

The best way I can describe this record is to paraphrase the way it was reviewed in an MRR year-end list.

'So many other power-pop records that came out this year were phenomenal but this record edges them out for one simple reason. it actually sounds like a power-pop record from the 70's'.

It doesn't sound modern at all. Great songwriting, great Elvis Costello vocals and perfect guitar-tone. Music to woo by

HERE

SHOES- BLACK VINYL SHOES

I love power-pop. A lot of it is too cheesy for its own good. Most of it is not as good as Cheap Trick's first five releases. Shoes are an exception. and exceptionally good one! but seriously, This is a really cool power-pop album. Recorded at the band's house in Zion, Illinois! This is fifteen songs of sugary-goodness that will have you tapping your feet and thinking about mushy-stuff, which is what I do all the time anyway.

HERE

CHRIS BELL- I AM THE COSMOS

For a long time Big Star were a band who's appeal I just didn't understand. Countless 'most under-appreciated bands of all-time' lists, constantly mentioned amongst great ahead-of-their-time bands like MC5 and New York Dolls and still on Allmusic's genre listing of proto-punk?

Upon first hearing 'Feel' I was immediately disappointed. I wanted everything I'd read, not the sugary 70's pop I was given. Needless to say, I left Big Star alone for a long time. Some years later I was getting into Cheap Trick pretty heavily and decided Big Star were worth a revisit. Oh what a fool I was for sleeping on them all those years. Some of the best pop-music ever committed to record.

So, a couple of months ago I saw that 4 Men With Beards had reissued this album by Chris Bell, one half of Big Star's chief songwriting-duo, that I had never heard of. Knowing that label's pretty reliable selection in the material they see fit to reissue, I opted to make a spur-of-the-moment purchase and I was not disappointed.

Much in the same way that Big Star's last original album Third was a sharp left-turn into sadsville, I Am The Cosmos is basically a heroin-soaked car ride to the edge of a cliff in the middle of the night. Bible in hand, of course. Bell would die shortly after the majority of these songs were completed, while driving home from the restaurant he worked at...

HERE