——————————————————-
* Tour of Southeast with Delay begins today
* In support of debut EP Now That We’re Alive

Beginning today, ANNABEL (Kent, OH) is hitting the road for a little southern lovin’ in support of its well-received debut EP Now That We’re Alive.

Playing an infectious brand of indie pop laced with feverish melodies, Annabel balances it all with post-punk dynamics that convey a heightened sense of urgency. The trio takes the best from several different genres, forging their own unique path as Now That We’re Alive shines a bright light on the band’s future.

Check out a free mp3s for the song “Boquet Mines.”

You can also watch Annabel’s Pink Couch Session where they perform a great acoustic version of “Parade Rest.” The video comes courtesy of the always entertaining and endlessly explorable If You Make It.

TOUR
——————————————————-
JUL 23 - Durham, NC @ Bull City Headquarters w/ Delay, Friendly Fire, Resist Not
JUL 24 - Saint Augustine, FL @ Nobby’s Sports Bar w/ Delay, The Winslows, Cough, Dark Castle
JUL 25 - Jacksonville, FL @ Shanty Town Pub w/ Delay, Monikers
JUL 26 - Orlando, FL @ The Black Box Collective w/ Delay, Monikers
JUL 27 - Naples, FL @ TBA w/ Delay
JUL 28 - Tampa, FL @ Skate Park of Tampa w/ The Tim Version, New Bruises, Inertia!, Crow’s Path
JUL 29 - Gainesville, FL @ Wayward Council w/ Jammy Dodgers
JUL 30 - Tallahassee, FL @ Oafhouse
JUL 31 - Pensacola, FL @ Sluggo’s w/ Delay
AUG 01 - Atlanta, GA @ 141 Moreland w/ Delay, Shang-A-Lang, Jonsin’
AUG 02 - Athens, GA @ The Hangar w/ Delay, Nana Grizol

A collection of infectious indie pop tunes with sharp melodies, released just in time to serve as the soundtrack for the spring and summer months. - Absolutepunk
Packing in driving, spiraling shoegaze guitars with the vocals hidden behind the ever so pleasant sounds they deliver. Highly recommended! - Collective Zine
Songs explode with lush layers of harmony vocals that take your breath away. This is a record you should own. - Jersey Beat
Annabel have the cojones to stand with some of the powerhouses in indie and post-rock. - Pastepunk

Talent and confidence certainly aren’t in short supply when referring to This Specific Dream or Ohm.  There are more than a few moments throughout the album that have a significant wow factor, with “Cicada” being the most heavily laden of the four tracks (and consequently the longest).  And it definitely takes some minerals to bust off an album with an average track length of over thirteen minutes, which is territory even instrumental heavyweights Mogwai and Explosions In The Sky rarely wander into (the former’s My Father My King being the exception).  My attention span seemed to be the only thing lacking, as I found myself reaching for the fast forward button on more than one occasion.  “A Slight Intermission” was the only track I managed to listen to in its entirety more than once, which qualifies it as the album highlight in my opinion.

Each of the four songs on the album contain a core sound, like a cleaner, spacier, version of Pelican that I thoroughly enjoyed.  It’s just that this delicious core was wrapped around too many minutes of unnecessary skin — like I had to work to get to the sweet, sweet innards.  Maybe a good edit would have been in order to pare away some of the excess.  Or maybe I’m an asshole for suggesting the artist change the art to appeal to my tastes.  After all, nobody told Homer or Milton to shorten things up a bit.

As it stands, Ohm has served me as a great listen for those times when I’m not really listening, which is unfortunate given the caliber of material.

Genre: Instrumental/Post-rock/Metal

RIYL: Pelican, Isis, Red Sparowes

Label:  Self-Released

www.myspace.com/thisspecificdream

Genre: Indie/Rock/Post-Hardcore

RIYL: Silversun Pickups, Engine Down, Glös

Label: Parks And Records

Latin Metrics

www.myspace.com/shuteyeunison

The Wading Girl hail from Roanoke, VA and recall what The Avett Brothers might sound like with an added female vocalist. Hell, after listening to The Miriam Demos, the Avetts might just want to add a sister to their family. I first learned of the band in 2007 when I went to see Tim Barry. The Wading Girl just so happened to be his backing band for that particular tour. Well, after many months I finally picked up the band’s latest release, The Miriam Demos. The EP is comprised of six songs chock full of indie/folk/pop storytelling at its finest. The dualing male/female vocals add a great deal to the band’s rollicking backbone. The male vocals are reminiscent of the Avetts and Conor Oberst of Bright Eyes while the female vocals recall Jenny Lewis of Rilo Kiley. Lyrically, The Wading Girl deal in the deep, dark south: religion, politics and booze of course. There is a live spontaneity comprised on The Miriam Demos that brings these songs to life. All throughout, The Wading Girl brim with something real and powerful as they inject their songs with a wonderful and free spirit. They may be young, but they are wise indeed.

Genre: Indie/Folk/Pop

RIYL: The Avett Brothers, Rilo Kiley, Bright Eyes

Label: Self-Released

Honey, We Lied

www.myspace.com/thewadinggirl

I haven’t been this excited about an acoustic songwriter since Mike Kinsella started recording as Owen — it’s that good. I suspect that you’ll be hearing a lot about Fences in the future, so you might as well hop on board now.

www.myspace.com/fencesvswolf

And here’s a video of another new song that I recorded the last time the band came through Colatown. This one is called “Pinebox”.

The Winter Sounds “Pinebox” from Will Miller on Vimeo.

At first listen, So Embarrassing has the potential to sound like a cluster-fuck of ideas, jarring from one to the next with no discernible pattern, explanation, or warning.  I, myself, felt as though some part of me had just been raped by “Pocket Protection is Essential” the first go around.  It wasn’t until abandoning all notions of conformity that I was able to appreciate So Embarrassing and all of its eccentricities, however left of center. To give some iota of context to the sounds to expect, say, The Mothers of Invention meets Dillinger Escape Plan meets Deerhoof, whatever that means to you.  Regardless, these truly are brilliant songs that are worthy of admiration, but I fear they may be a little too brilliant for most (myself included).

I reserve little doubt that Capillary Action aren’t likely to be a band whose songs you’d hear blasting out of car windows while stuck in rush hour traffic. To be honest, I’d be shocked if I encountered any of them outside of my own headphones.  But for those seasoned enough to withstand the musical ass-kicking that Jonathan Pfeffer and the rest of Capillary Action lay down, the rewards are numerous and notable.  So Embarrassing is an album that will continue to reveal secrets long after the rest of your record collection has blown its load.

Genre: Error 415 - Unsupported Media Type

RIYL: Mr. Bungle, Mike Patton, Deerhoof

Label: Pangaea Recordings/Natural Selection Records

Elevator Fuck

Bloody Nose

www.myspace.com/capillaryaction

The Gaslight Anthem / Marry A Thief / Of Angels and Lions / Twilight Armada

Tuesday July 8th 2008 / New Brookland Tavern / Columbia, SC

So I live in Sacramento California. Sacramento is great. Its got a great selection of pub’s, a ton of great Mexican restaurants and is smack dab in the middle of Lake Tahoe and San Francisco. Although Sacramento is roughly four times the size of my hometown of Columbia it doesn’t do near as a good of job of pulling in music. So why my friends have seen The Colour Revolt like fives times, I am waiting on my first.

I naturally get excited when I come back to Columbia since there is always a chance that I’ll get to see a good show. When my friend Bryan told me The Gaslight Anthem were playing on Tuesday I realized that I got real lucky.

I unfortunately didn’t get to see any but the last opening band and was too busy catching up with old friends to give them much attention. They were young and may or may not have been christian.

The Gaslight Anthem is the perfect band to see live. Even if you can’t remember all of the words you can mouth along. Nobody will care (or at least you shouldn’t). The energy in the room was the magnitude of any of my more memorable punk rock shows. The setlist mainly consisted of Sink or Swim and all the tracks from Senor and the Queen. I don’t think got to hear a lot of stuff from The ‘59 Sound. For a show on Tuesday night, we’re you are looking forward to drinking and singing along to good music, you sort of prefer it that way. My favorite moment was the combination of “Say I Won’t” and “We’re Getting A Divorce, You Keep The Diner”. Both are great live songs with moving sing-along moments.

The sad truth is the only time I’ll be able to see The Gaslight Anthem on the West Coast is at The Warped Tour, which I’ll never do, or some overcrowded SF music club. Its not that seeing The Gaslight Anthem at a large venue would be bad but you prefer to see them in a smaller club.

Music is much the same way.  Assuming the shoegaze position for an entire live set can crumble even the biggest wall of sound. Many otherwise great songs have been ruined by the likes of an amateur vocalist, and vice versa.  McAllen, Texas’ They Mean Us side-step at least one of the above pitfalls and prove themselves as masters of the unspeakable.  Their titanic album Friendship Lottery is truly one of the great communicators in the Instrumental genre that is tarnished by repetition, imitation, and for some, stagnation.

Typical to the genre, They Mean Us take a little longer to get their point across (“Pickle Seals” is the shortest of the six tracks clocking in just shy of the four minute mark), but by no means overstay their welcome.  Rather than spend needless bars crafting celestial crescendo, They Mean Us rely on deft shifts of theme, tempo, style and perspective to draw the listener in.  The sheer grace of it all is what keeps you there.  Whimsical, That’s Your Fire era Aloha-esque vibraphone phrases, intricate American Football style guitar picking, rolling prog-rock bass lines, warm cello and tasteful electronics: Friendship Lottery takes the best elements of the past decade of music, fuses them, layers it, and executes it perfectly.

They Mean Us and Friendship Lottery bring to the table a peerless brand of post-ish rock without the drama, and math-rock without the geometrics.  It’s less filling, and tastes great.

Genre: Instrumental/Math-Rock

RIYL: Toe, The Six Parts Seven, Dinomania

Label: Self-Released/Look Again Media

Dan Mason

www.myspace.com/tmu

It is true that Let Live and Let Ghosts starts out with the happy yet agitated pop songs. “Good Day” is light in its bridge, driving in its verse and repetitious in its chorus. The second track, “Hold It In” is deliberately clumsy with traces of panic in each of the member’s instruments. At times the album sounds like a piano lesson and other times a powerful pop band. “Under My Skin” adds in some great vocal harmonies with a chorus that crescendos, dies and then suddenly explodes into a compelling rock movement. Occasionally, it is so full it conjures up images of Queen.

The second half of the album is strikingly different than the first. The songs bleed into one another making not multiple songs but one transcending musical production. The topics are a bit darker and the music more matured. With all the dynamic transitions and shifts in music style it sounds like a musical. For example, “Victoria” starts out with an almost Gershwin style, ragtime piano solo and then jumps into a pounding rock and roll song. There are some ballads here too. “My Heart’s the Same” features mostly vocals and piano moving the song. It earns the band the Ben Folds Five comparisons. The album brilliantly then crashes into “Lighting Myself On Fire” so quick it is hard to realize that this a new song. The album concludes in an apocalyptic theme with the combination of “Where Are All The Scientists Now?” and “A Matter of Time”. It is the most mid-tempo part of the album and its vocal harmonies are strangely relaxing.

Bands like Jukebox the Ghost are rare. You can tell the band put a lot of effort into Let Live and Let Ghosts. The band is complicated, grandiose and still a lot of fun. With all of the abrupt, contrasting transitions the band can sometimes be exhausting and it would be nice to hear more harmonies and choruses to hum too. It is hard to criticize such a capable band, however.

Genre: Indie/Pop

RIYL: Ben Folds, Dismemberment Plan, Travis Morrison

Label: The Rebel Group

Static To The Heart

www.myspace.com/jukeboxtheghost