With spooky Yeah Yeah Yeah vocals and an overall musical approach that sits well between stiff and puncturing Glass Eye and the esoteric ebb, flow, and noise swirl of the Angels of Light, this is arty without being overtly postured and pretentious, even a bit spiritual (“kiss the sun/set me free/open heart whole”), without falling prey to freak folk platitudes.  Granted, there is a spaciness here and there, teetering on the edge of ambience, which is usually truncated by a post-punk guitar crunch and staccato to make your spine shiver.  Even when they unleash their most rock’n’roll explorations, like “The Machine,” with its hypno-repetitions, that grrly voice floats in uneasily, making the drums skitter into small quaint neo-jazz pitter patter as the ghosts swirl. It navigates tension and tautness, a brittle contest between open spaces — free floating voice quivers and guitar drainage that radiates in brief busts. The utterly subdued and almost trip hoppy “Night of the Crickets,” which could be stolen and reworked from an UNKLE album, is riddled with shoe gazey guitars loading in every few minutes, bringing pitch and controlled turmoil to the poetry processions. (more…)

On tour with the BellRays, these flashback fornicators with rock’n’roll road warrior finesse offer their muscular, but not macho, postures of perfected raconteur rock. Just tune into “Cold Hard Facts” for your first dose, which resembles the walloping world of The Hellacopters though with a kind of unexpected poetry beneath it all, lyrically infused in lines like “Young girls in hotel towers/Call out, “Three Hundred Flowers”/They’re spinning glaciers into gold.” The word play might be a bit subsumed by the ricocheting double guitar motor madness and the drums fusing the MC5 with Mooney Suzuki, but it’s worth the immersion. “Hard Times” actually takes up a little nod to more stiff, even power poppy fare, until they head headlong into 1980’s chorus-driven rock with their appeals to wanky “rebel sounds.” The song actually foments a solid tension, a bit of retro dinosaur rock re-hashed with pop finesse. “Pills” unveils their FM sensibilities, with soaring choruses and a dissection of the pills that toss you down on “the road to broken-heartville,” and if you listen loosely for a minute, I think they are channeling Soul Asylum, though with sped-up punch. (more…)