Big Red ★

Blood by The Middle East

There are talentless overpaid hacks plastered all over the television and spewing worthless dreck through radio airwaves, and then there are unknown bands like The Middle East huddled into dingy basement practice spaces creating gorgeous music filled with complexity and heart. It’s sad how most of the worthwhile art is created in anonymity. […] — Captain Obvious

Minding My Own Business by Coconut Records

It’s the solo project/brain child of none other than Jason Schwartzman, whom you hopefully know from more than just the Mellow Yellow GAP commercial and Phantom Planet. His debut record (Nighttiming) came out in March of 2007 and is utterly fantastic, from start to finish. The simple yet painfully familiar lyrics are set to poppy melodies and accented by random samples in foreign tongues and not-so-boring background noise. Yea, I know—how vague of me, right? Whatever. Just trust me on this one: you need to hear this f—-ing record. […] - The Orphan Review

Tonight by We Are Scientist

The band’s 2006 major-label debut, “With Love and Squalor,” a feisty mix of high-energy rock and shout-along hooks, aligned We Are Scientists with such famed UK-acts as Editors and Arctic Monkeys. Since that album, We Are Scientists lost a member (drummer Michael Tapper) and replaced him with two musicians-for-hire who bring with them an array of instrumental sounds, including keyboards and saxophone. Despite Tapper’s absence, We Are Scientists’ music is fuller and bigger than ever. […] - Monica Cady, Live Daily

Dimension by Wolfmother

Let’s get one thing straight: Wolfmother rocks. The three-piece band from Australia have managed to look back to past styles of rock and roll and fuse with them with modern techniques to create a concoction that’s refreshing as it is unique. In a modern rock world saturated with pretenders, Wolfmother has managed to make music that actually sounds like rock and roll. […] - The Student Operated Press

Dancing Choose by TV On The Radio

TV on the Radio’s music is a new kind of rock ‘n’ roll, one that collects all of this itinerant noise and recycles it, spits it back out as a pulsing, sandblasted reckoning. Fuzz and buzz, tumble-dry spin cycle patterns—are we listening to synthesizers or guitars, live drums or a programmed approximation? The dense mix of the New York City band’s sound—redundant, perhaps, on its surface, yet a swamp of complication beneath that serves as an artist’s rendering of the very city it comes from—makes piecemeal analysis irrelevant. It’s all one, a sonic totality of post-industrial digi-funk and the paranoid, lovesick blues of the Information Age—or, as Tunde Adebimpe sings in “DLZ”, the penultimate track on the band’s new Dear Science, “the long-winded blues of the never”. […] - Zeth Lundy, PopMatters

Lullaby Haze by Mates of State

As much as it can be a disappointment when some musicians refuse to evolve or progress their sound over time, I find that there are always certain bands that I simply don’t want to see change. I’d much rather have them continue doing the same thing that they’ve been doing since day one. For me, Mates of State are one of those bands. This husband and wife duo have been writing cute and catchy pop songs for over 10 years now, using primarily a piano/organ and drums combination. […] - Muzak For Cybernetics