Berated

In surveying jangle-pop albums, calling an album great makes allowance for more uninspired tracks than on most other genre releases. Like early ‘50s rock albums by groups like the Everly Brothers – who inspired many of them – they are slipshod assemblies of 45s and tracks produced to sound faintly like those 45s. They’re nevertheless [...]

Balthazar B & The Beatitudes are an eclectic collective of musicians. The former name is a moniker for the Parisian artist Balthazar B. His collaborators, the Beatitudes, rotate between doctors, philosophers, and religious scholars. Maxwell and Ernest Beatitude are core contributors and childhood friends of Balthazar B. Each track on their new album, Like Shrapnel, [...]

With a sound that immediately brings to mind early Grizzly Bear, Virginia Beach’s We Are Trees have made an impressive second EP stock full of lush harmonies, post-Galaxie 500 guitar tones, and laid-back grooves. Hooks are abundant, and each song is a tight piece of pop that mixes elements from the entire canon of American [...]

The hordes of amateur mixtape manufactures – and the many sites that host them – prove somewhat of a detriment to the most ambitious of the niche. The potential simplicity of the practice makes it daunting to sift through; some mixtapers are content with mundanely placing a rhythm section over a particular beat, as if [...]

Hailing from the small university town of Ann Arbor, Jonathan Visger’s solo project Absofacto produces a delightful sound that reconstitutes the ghosts of indie rock’s past into something vaguely infectious. If one were a lazy music critic and decided to use that “if (blank), (blank), and (blank) were put in a blender/sat next to each [...]

I am all about recycling, upcycling, composting… anything that reuses materials that are already on this earth. If a friend wants to use jeans for insulation or to make a quilt out of old clothes, I will be over in an instant! But recycling music? I was not keen on this idea until I heard [...]

We go back in time for this lost gem. Its sounds are vaguely recognizable as pop, but as the kind of pop somehow reconfigured from secondhand rumors, hazy and jagged reminiscences. Songs constructed from the rusty shards from the broken down chassis that litter the front lawn of alt-rock's trailer home.

Hailing from Chicago, Santah put catchy, no-frills alternative rock back on the main stage. The five-piece fuse the ambition of all members into a cohesive and successful album, White Noise Bed – a group courtesy of GroopEase, who recently offered their full-length for $3 – a $6 discount. Fans of The Walkmen, The Veils, and [...]

Matt Stevens‘ instrumental arsenal does not compare to a full-blown orchestra, which can be a challenge for one without the flexibility of vocal accompaniment. Percussion, bass, and guitars are all he needs, with glockenspiel and strings entering the fray occasionally. His two past full-lengths have resulted in a significant online following, who are bound to [...]

September’s compilation is massive… I don’t know where to start. These twenty tracks from the past month, ranging in every style from soothing folk to Halloween-themed hip-hop, offer greater diversity than usual — and it’s not just due to the sheer number of tracks. New tastes on Obscure Sound have emerged with several new writers [...]