Album Reviews

Artist: Tuff Sunshine Title: Dig Deeper, Peanut Label: Declared Goods Self-described as an “indie/rock/acoustic/garage/non-genre-restricted musical vehicle” (a description that instantly made me want to listed to it), “Dig Deeper, Peanut” is the new album from New York based band Tuff Sunshine. The 10 songs include on the recorded tell the story of …

Estelle California is an emerging singer-songwriter originally based in France. While learning piano at five years old, her ambitions were stunted due to childhood trauma; constant physical and mental familial abuse would cause her to temporarily lose her ability to speak. Despite this perturbing hurdle, she studied saxophone and dance …

The power trio concept has been coming back in a really big way this year, and in The Turnback’s new single “You Kill Me,” we essentially learn why – efficiency. By keeping things limited to the guitar-bass-drums formula in “You Kill Me,” a band like The Turnback are able to …

We look upon a messy living room in the first few frames of the new video for The Bobbleheads’ “Joey,” eventually finding the eponymous Joey spread out on the couch with that dreaded, grimacing look of unemployment painted on his face. His girlfriend’s had it with his lack of initiative, …

Portland doom-metal duo Fox Medicine craft a very unique and eclectic sound. Combining the harsh, distorted riffs of sludge metal with the bubblegum-sweet vocals that BABYMETAL have made famous creates combination. Their newest album, Procédures Mystiques creates the strange and terrific soundtrack to a pastel apocalypse. The album opens with …

A ghostly harmony comes sliding out of the silence in the title track of Sarah Lee Langford’s Two Hearted Rounder as though it were rising from the ashes of a long-forgotten American songbook. Spackled in twang and saturated with self-aware lyrics from Ms. Langford, “Two Hearted Rounder” sets the tone for the …

Jeremy Rice’s latest release Jeremy Rice and the Legendary Fist of Takinawa opens with the pensive mid-tempo march of “Johnny Rogers”. It’s an excellent opening curtain for the release highlighting the textured manner of Rice’s compositional talents and his nasal yet expressive vocals. There’s no other track on the album that’s …

“I ain’t tryin’ to start a class war” pleads Josef McManus, the mastermind behind White Owl Red, in the new single “Working Class Heroes,” the latest release from his critically acclaimed solo project. White Owl Red gets back to the basics of red, white and blue melodies adorned with smart, …

Some people refer to alternative rock as the last great revolution in the rock genre but we are far away from its birth in the late 80’s-early 90’s. Despite being two decades plus on from those halcyon days, young musicians of every ilk are still picking up guitars and turning …

“Coming Home” is a previously unreleased Veterans Day tribute from international rock duo, Follow No One. Many rock and metal fans know that Follow No One’s Rich Hall possesses one of the most impressive vocal ranges of recent memory. What is not widely known is that Rich is a two-tour …

The beats that adorn every stitch of audio we find in the Toronto Tabla Ensemble’s “Dream Symposium” are exotic to no end, but their most endearing qualities come from their sensuous arrangement and not from the worldly stylization of their tone. Right out of the gate, we’re hypnotized by the …

A vivacious acoustic guitar springs the first few chords of Caroline Blind’s “God Damn the Sun” to life with an opulent melodicism that will become all the more powerful as we press on in this excellent cover of the Swans song of the same name. Blind begins to sing, and …