My last Grampall Jookabox Pitchfork review, of Ropechain, led to an interesting rebuttal from the label.  Not sure if AK’s got another Bill Veeck-esque gimmick in the hopper this time around, but my take on the new one, Dead Zone Boys, is up today.  The record is a big improvement on Ropechain, though the B-movie [...]

What if Nine Inch Nails-inspired modern rock dialed in on Trent Reznor’s simmering synth-pop fixation, instead of begetting aggro mid-90s stuff like Filter and Stabbing Westward? What if Secret Machines bought vintage Korgs and hired Doug Martsch to sing? What if the M83 guy were less French and more alt-bro? These (and others!) are the [...]

You might say I’ve Had This Song Dancin’ In My Ears For The Past Few Months (you might not say that).  Either way, I’ve been passively hoping over the last couple days that they’d play this one for PTV.  It’ll make my top ten tracks this year, and it’s good to know it translates live [...]

Back to reviewing albums and tracks at the Fork after a bit of a layoff. An Alex Metric track review (complete with fun movie quotes) here, and an Alec Ounsworth album review (complete with two full albums), here. I highly recommend Mo Beauty for your personal home collection.
And because the song’s now in [...]

A few things about this
1) Not to get all punny on the SoCal vibe they’re reaching for here, but “Horchata” really jumps with both feet into The Ocean That Is Everything Haters Hated About Vampire Weekend the first time around. And for that, good for them. The “horchata”/”balaklava” rhyme scheme in particular seems [...]

All sound is more or less “noise” until conventions congeal to classify it as “music,” but according to Marc Masters’ “The Decade in Noise”, dozens of bands used the Oughts to reintroduce dissonance and volume to rock and punk audiences. In the process new hybrids were created, more wild polarities explored, and, like so [...]

“The most striking thing to me about this isn’t: Downloading possibly leads to sales. But: Over the course of the past decade, a lot of people just stopped giving a shit about music altogether. Yet the survey, its results (from what I’ve seen) and the discussions of it don’t seem to consider this at all.”
This [...]

A new track from The Field, the first from his forthcoming Yesterday and Today LP, called “The More That I Do,” is available in downloadable form. Predictably, it’s good. But a different kind of good than the icy winds of From Here We Go Sublime: it’s still based around a fat rhythm bed, [...]

As I’m sitting here watching my Interpersonal Comm. students take an exam today (update: something which I’m still doing), my friend Maura pops up in my IM window with a question. She was wondering as to the validity of this particular study (warning: not in English), and more specifically, this arstechnica article citing it. [...]

Hopefully soon, I’ll be able to post two things: some thoughts on 2009 songs and albums thus far (Phoenix, “My Girls,” Yeah Yeah Yeahs, AC Newman, Royksopp), and more excitingly, my take on some of the best stuff to come out of Indiana lately (the Broderick, We Are Hex, Push/Pull, I’m looking in your direction[s]). [...]