Are you ready to get blipped and bleeped until your jeans tight-roll themselves? Because Junior Boys' fourth album, It’s All True, (Domino) will probably make you think you’re live on Dance TV. The Canadian duo blends spaced out synths with a bevy of ’80s-inspired melodies and sensitive vocals. Junior Boys singer Jeremy Greenspan nails some lovely high notes on the pouty tune “Banana Ripple,” and I swear I ... Read More

  For a band with a radical name, Toronto’s sprawling hardcore collective Fucked Up sure do make one hell of an old-fashioned racket. There was once this thing called an “album,” and a subgenre of this archaic method of presentation was the monolithic “rock opera.” David Comes to Life (Matador) represents, in many ways, the most punk thing Fucked Up could do right now, because what’s more ... Read More

On Wit’s End (Domino), Cass McCombs shows us all that songs about debilitating sadness and unrelenting hopelessness can make for some pretty catchy tunes. Having cornered the market on bumming people out with 2009’s heavily instrumented Catacombs, McCombs appears to have moved on to making mascara run from the cheeks with just the sound of his voice and some accompanying clicks and clatters. While Catacombs provided what can ... Read More

Just in time for summer, Holly Golightly and The Brokeoffs deliver another round of dark Americana music perfect for your next moonshine tasting or impromptu back porch shindig—No Help Coming (Transdreamer). It has been four years, and four albums, since the duo consisting of Ms. Golightly and Lawyer Dave released their gritty 2007 debut, You Can’t Buy A Gun When You’re Crying, and the two don’t show any signs of ... Read More

If you've been to New York City's Terminal 5 venue, you know that it's essentially the cage in the apocalyptic film Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. Hordes of people are crammed into a two-tiered concrete arena with weird cable "fencing" on the 2nd floor to keep them from falling a few hundred feet to a live soundtrack. But it was actually not a bad place to see NYC-based band Cold Cave, now on tour to promote their sophomore album Cherish the ... Read More