// Category Archive for: Music

Music Review: The Garden, The Life And Times Of A Paperclip

By Less Lee Moore

My introduction to The Garden was the video for “I Am A Woman.” I was immediately taken with the band’s sound and the low budget, nonsensical video that featured one member wearing women’s clothes and makeup. Music that sounds like Killing Joke and The Minutemen? Guys in drag? Sign me up.

The Life And Times Of A Paperclip is the Burger Records debut of the duo known as The Garden, 19-year-old identical twins named Wyatt (vocals, bass) and Fletcher (drums, drag) Shears, who started making music a couple of years ago. Although the album has 16 tracks, it’s only 19 minutes long, but the songs are so good, you’ll be happy to listen to it on repeat for a couple of hours at a time.

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Ticket Giveaway: Los Amigos Invisibles, Xenia Rubinos To Play Summer Splash Concert In New York, August 8

By Chelsea Spear

Do you like rock en español and boats? If so, we have just the show for you. Summer Splash Concert Cruise Series recently announced a show featuring a pair of Latin alternative artists with serious skill, vision, and creativity. Popshifter will be giving away a pair of tickets to a lucky New York reader. Keep reading for more details!

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Waxing Nostalgic Cover Albums: Bulletboys, Rocked & Ripped

By Jeffery X Martin

I don’t know what a Bulletboy is. I might have heard one of their songs late at night while driving. Someone might have mentioned the name at a bar. That seems right, because I was more than likely drunk. I don’t remember things so well when I’m drunk.

Here’s the funny thing.

Now that I’ve listened to a cover album by Bulletboys called, aggressively enough, Rocked & Ripped, I have to go back and listen to their entire catalog. If Bulletboys is as wacky, bluesy, and just flat-out good as this record is, I have some catching up to do.

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Music Review: Soft Metals, Lenses

By Less Lee Moore

Soft Metals is an appropriate name for a band whose members initially bonded over analog synthesizers. The music of Patricia Hall and Ian Hicks has a hypnagogic quality that’s both solid and liquid. Their newest album, Lenses, continues this liminal exercise with various lyrical visions of love and lust. How you interpret the songs can depend on your mood or point of view.

Rather than relying on harsh textures, the washes of synths on Lenses are mostly fuzzy, sometimes squishy, but rarely piercing, and even then, only when it’s most effective. Hall’s chilly, voluptuous delivery is appropriate for music that’s overflowing with icy sensuality, frequently sounding like the lost soundtrack to a sci fi film from the late ’70s or early ’80s.

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Music Review: White Fence, White Fence (Reissue)

By Less Lee Moore

If you’ve become a fan of Tim Presley’s loopy, psychedelic White Fence but haven’t yet heard the eponymous debut, you’re in luck. Drag Records offshoot God? has reissued the album on vinyl. It’s probably the best format for a White Fence album.

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Music Review: Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, I Wonder What She’s Doing Tonite

By Melissa Bratcher

Both the liner notes and the back cover of I Wonder What She’s Doing Tonite posit that Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart’s association with the Monkees hurt Boyce & Hart’s legacy—that by having written for a “made-for-TV” pop band somehow diminishes their songwriting credibility. Every Monkees album, save for the soundtrack to Head, had at least one Boyce and Hart song on it. And most of those songs were perfect little pop diamonds, carefully crafted and catchy as anything.

I Wonder What She’s Doing Tonite is a collection of the best of Boyce & Hart. Full of complex pop songs with amazing production, these songs will make you wonder just why they aren’t revered like Goffin/King or Mann/Weil. It’s pure joy in your ears.

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Waxing Nostalgic Cover Albums: Powerman 5000, Copies, Clones & Replicants

By Jeffery X Martin

When you die and go to hell, and Satan forces you and the other souls doomed to eternal torment into an aerobics class, the only album your sadistic demon instructor will ever play will be Powerman 5000’s cover album, Copies, Clones & Replicants. You will scream in agony and beg for relief. It will not come.

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Music Review: The Blow Monkeys, Feels Like A New Morning

By Melissa Bratcher

The Blow Monkeys have returned and I didn’t even know I’d missed them. The aptly titled Feels Like A New Morning is a collection of hopeful songs, sung by a man who is clearly at a crossroads, and who sounds pretty damn comfortable with himself. I dig it.

In the eighties, The Blow Monkeys were known for their jazzy, poppy confections with thought-provoking lyrics (and Dr. Robert’s hair, because that was amazing). Now older and wiser, Robert Howard is still writing thinky lyrics, and knows his way around a hook. But these songs aren’t confections; they’re a bit more savory.

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Assemblog: July 12, 2013

The Heat

New this week on Popshifter: Paul has some surprising but apt suggestions in his two-part series on Horror Movies For Kids; Melissa loves bands with tuba players and as a result, raves about That’s It! from the Preservation Hall Jazz Band; Jeff will crack you up with his review of the probably unnecessary Thank You from Duran Duran; Chelsea enjoyed the “irresistible prose” and vast wealth of stories in Curtis Harrington’s memoir Nice Guys Don’t Work In Hollywood; I strongly recommend Desperation, the latest album from the Oblivians and share my thoughts (and a couple of photos) from last week’s IO Echo/CSS show at The Mod Club.

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Concert Review: IO Echo/CSS at The Mod Club

By Less Lee Moore

Toronto, ON
July 4, 2013

Io Echo’s Ministry Of Love is shaping up to be one of my favorite new releases of 2013, so I was looking forward to witnessing their particular blend of post punk shoegaze in a live setting.

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