Wiccans - Field II

This is everything I loved about music when I was in high school and everything that made my parents worried that I was a crack-addicted fucktard. It is unintelligible, infectious and loud. This album gets our highest recommendation if you want to be a punk rock Peter Pan. If you've already grown up, then buy it anyway so they can afford to move to Austin and leave me the hell alone.

Team Tomb - s/t

Pretentious. Team Tomb. Caleb Ian Campbell. Three different ways to say the same thing. Between the Peopleodianesque loops, the incessant falsetto and the incomprehensible lyrics, you get the feeling that Team Tomb wants you to know that they are way better than you, but don't want you to be able to figure out why. I'm gonna bet that it's just a front. The singers' vocals are dreamy and distorted to obscure their inability to sing. The lyrics are buried under the uninspired sounds to hide the fact that there isn't a narrative here—and the song titles we're just made up and slapped on to sound cool: (“Put a bird on it!”). The overall musical landscape just doesn't go anywhere too interesting. I'd liken the listening of this album to masturbating for an hour without climaxing. It might be OK here and there, but, c'mon, what's the point?

The Treelines - EP & Dream House b/w Pact

Why do these people (read: Ryan Becker, Tony Ferraro and Grady Sandlin) keep playing in bands together? This EP is just proof that they have gotten too comfortable together (read: lazy). It's so simple, sweet and straightforward that it crosses right over into boring. The music sounds like filler used to kill time while people tune on-stage. And nothing against vocalist Amanda Newton (read: I hate you), but couldn't they have at least tried to find someone that wasn't just already sitting around with them. Maybe someone with a bit more punch to lively things up. I know that she wrote the lyrics, but she could have handed them over to New Science Projects' Dale Jones. I know the guys have played with him before. Not that it would have made the songs any better, but it might have at least been more interesting. Maybe they'll do better next time.

Nope, they didn't. If your own songs are boring, what should you do? Release a cover from a band that sounds painfully similar to you and back it with an audio experiment that sounds like a four year old made it on their Speak & Spell? No. That's the opposite of what you should do. The silver lining in this waste of plastic is that it seems Amanda has run out of things to say and this will be the last we hear from them. M̶a̶y̶b̶e̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶y̶'̶l̶l̶ ̶d̶o̶ ̶b̶e̶t̶t̶e̶r̶ ̶n̶e̶x̶t̶ ̶t̶i̶m̶e̶.̶ Maybe they'll kill themselves.

Fairbanks - Pipe Dream

Oh boy! Three chord pop punk with lyrics about anger and disillusionment! This is the most original music I have ever heard in my life! It's like they know me and understand everything I'm going through with my parents and my teachers and my bitch of an ex-girlfriend!

I can't wait until these kids get out of high school and life bitch slaps them to the ground.

Father Figure - tape

Father Figure is live recordings of three guys with severe tourettes that have instruments hot glued to their hands. Please don't make fun of them. It's not their fault that Michael Briggs did that to them.

Nervous Curtains - Fake Infinity

Upon first listen, I thought that this sounded like something I'd heard before. No, I'm not referring to the obvious synth and industrial artists that Nervous Curtains owes their sound to. This was something else, something that jogged an immediate response buried somewhere in my memory. After hours of going through my music collection, trying to find out why this sounded so damn familiar, I gave up. A few days later, I realized where I'd heard it before when my grandmother sent me a link to something that I “had to watch!” Thanks for solving the mystery, Granny!

Summer of Glaciers - Small Spaces

I know I haven't posted in a while, and Summer of Glaciers is the reason. It it physically impossible to stay awake for the entirety of this album. I think the guys over at Gutterth could make a fortune selling this as a new age sleep aide. But since we're pretending it's music, I'll go ahead and translate these songs titles for you so you can better understand the material.

1. Inches Mean Miles – these 3 minutes feel like an eternity
2. To the Ground – where I threw the CD after I came out of my coma
3. Elevators – that don't go anywhere
4. Monologues – one guy pointlessly rambling on
5. Removal – it just keeps growing, like cancer. Cut it off
6. When We Part – I will hate you
7. The Use of Mirrors (exclusive download-only track) – This piece of shit didn't make it on the album

Bad Design - s/t & Darstar - Tiny Darkness

This past weekend I had the misfortune of letting my friend drag me to a show where I had to be surrounded by idiots and listen to not one, but four awful bands. I've already told you what I think of Hormones and Here Holy Spain is just too easy of a target, so let's take a look at two of DFW's “rising stars.” 

Bad Design was unimpressive live, but I figured I'd give them a chance to see if they were better studio musicians. They're not. The first thing you can pick out is John Gillespe's guitar work—the same guitar work that made Dear Human too fucking annoying to not catch Gutterth's ear a couple years ago. Then the singer's vocals come in, anguished and forced like he's trying to take a shit. He'll probably blow his vocal chords out after a few more shows and I won't have to worry about a sophomore album. If not, then they can drop “Design” from their name, because clearly there isn't any.

Darstar is everything that was wrong with music in the 90s: Accessible pop-rock with no real innovation or passion that's been pasted over with somebody's misguided idea of “edge” in the form of distorted guitars, militant drums and a sexy female lead singer. If the 90s revival keeps heading the way that it is, these guys will probably be huge with the 102.1 listeners in a few years. That said, I'm gonna go ahead and write them off as a waste of time. “Fuck these stupid bitches.”

Glass Caverns - s/t

I once spent an entire week in my room listening to nothing but Phil Collins. Then I made this record.

Brack Cantrell has a great voice, (yes, I can say nice things) so I don't know why he's buried it underneath the music or run it through effects. I understand that being in Sundress must have been incredibly fucking boring. You'd expect the one person in the band with some form of talent to have a decent solo project. Maybe the rest of them have rubbed off on him.

And, yes, I know that sentence brings up a disturbing mental picture, but hey, guys get bored on tour. Things happen. I'm not judging, but I will offer a reward to anyone with photos of this. I need content.

Bobgoblin - Love Lost For Blood Lust: Part I

I can't decide what's worse: the music, the lyrics or the fact that Bobgoblin take themselves so seriously; so we'll use the patented fudfw point system to determine why we hate them so much.

The Music

• pop-punk (-10)
• “whoas” (+3)
• keyboard sounds borrowed from The Rentals (+1)
• occasionally borrowed voice of Anthony Kiedis (-5)
• complete lack of balls (-5)

The Lyrics

• the entirety of Feel No Pain (-5)
• “Stomp and Go! Prescribe and Conquer! Through the Skies, through Veins, through Water!” (+2)
• use of the words “twas” and o'er” (-2)
• using a eulogy as lyrics (-4)
• robotic voice-over at the end of the record (-2)
• a 16-year-old's vocabulary (-4)

Self-Importance

• needing a setting and back story for a 6-track EP (-5)
• thinking that you're from the future (+2)
• the descriptions at the beginning of each song to let you know what the fuck they're singing about and why (-15)
• the fact that they thought they had enough to say that they put out an album after a 14-year hiatus (-10)
• the fact that it's part 1 of 2 (-500)

Well, there you have it folks. Clearly the worst thing about this record is that it was made by Bobgoblin, a band that should have died in some sort of pyrotechnics accident a long time ago.

Bravo Zulu - all our days...

This record sounds phoned in, as if the band didn't put any effort into it. But I'm sure it's hard work to create original songs entirely ripped off from the Casio keyboard presets. Seriously, check out the opening sequence. It was clearly inspired by the dance scene from The Breakfast Club. That's ok. I don't expect much these days. The album was produced by one of the guys from Old Snack, so the fact that all of the songs don't sound exactly the fucking same was a huge shock.

Mystery Skulls - EP

This is what Prince sounds like when you lock him in an arcade with a steady diet of crystal meth and acid.

Seryn - Seryn and Friends Christmas

I'm going to be honest with you—I never listened to this whole record. I couldn't find a way to download it for free, and I couldn't justify the $8 price tag just to hear this “non-Christian” band sing about Christ. Seriously, if I were Jesus, I'd be offended. That's like saying “Happy birthday, Jesus! Thanks for dying for our sins! Check out this [shitty] indie-pop we made you! Our friends in An Absence of Color told us you would like it.” Couldn't these guys find another way to make a quick buck off of an already commercial-laden religious holiday? Just go steal from the collection plate at your local church. More people go in December anyway and it would keep me from having to hear your versions of Christmas songs when all I wanted was to get a cup of coffee and sit in heavenly peace.

No, We Can't Be Friends

Fate Lions - Natural Champion / Hold Me 7” EP

I think the reason Fate Lions put out a 7-inch instead of a full album is because they only have one song. I'm pretty sure the b-side is just the a-side sped up. With how commercial this sounds, that's not a bad idea. Just make one hit and keep feeding it to the masses. It's weird to think that some of the shitty bands you hear on Clear Channel stations started off as shitty local bands, determined to sell out and go big. Hopefully they'll get signed by a major label soon so that Jason can go ahead and fatally OD in some hotel room while on tour with Foo Fighters.

Achtöne! - s/t

I was in the waiting room at the dentist last week and I was forced to watch a half-hour of CSI on mute, while a toddler loudly smashed random toys against each other. Now I won't say that listening to the Achtöne! record was by far the most annoying waste of 30 minutes in my life, but I think these two instances made me produce identical sets of brainwaves. Just because you own instruments does not mean that you should start a band. Likewise, because you release an EP does not mean that anyone will care.

I know I don't.

Tony Ferraro - Assemble the Bitch Wolves b/w Diaspora

The latest effort from Tony Ferraro is two songs that sound like they didn't make the final cut for that Last Joke record. “Assemble the Bitch Wolves” doesn't go anywhere even remotely interesting, unless you count the toy piano solo in the middle (which I don't). Lyrically, it reminds me of high school poetry, full of banality and tired imagery. I'm picturing him at the talent show, a handful of scraps from his notebook, just reading his prose while his friends, whose parents bought them instruments for Christmas, fumble through a hackneyed set. “Diaspora,” on the other hand, is as upbeat and rockin' as you can get for an original tune from a Counting Crows cover band. How old is this guy, anyway? Let's wrap this up with a quick track-by-track breakdown:

“Assemble the Bitch Wolves”: Boring

“Diaspora”: Pathetic

Old Snack - everything is happening so fast

Why did it take a year to finish a 20-minute record? I've spent longer than that in the bathroom, and I usually produce something of better quality. Too many “musicians” think that they can start a punk band these days and it's getting really old. Old Snack has opted for the Green Day Method: Get three guys with minimal talent, obsess over The Clash, write a bunch of songs that sound the same, put out a record and wait for girls to blow you. Honestly, that doesn't sound like a bad idea. Anyone want to start a punk band? DM me on Twitter.

Meaner Demeanor - Tape

The best thing about this album is that it's short. The worst thing about this album is that there's still ten minutes of it. This music makes me lose faith in humanity. If you are in Meaner Demeanor, please kill yourself. If you are a fan of Meaner Demeanor, please kill yourself and all of your closest friends.

hormones - to the 9s

Okay—this album just screams mediocrity. There's something so familiar about every track. Each song sounds like I've heard it before, but it just wasn't good enough for me to bother remembering it. The energy, volume and style of the record jumps all over the place, so that when I actually made it to the last cut, “Migraine,” that's exactly what I had.