Finally, at long last, I was back in Florida. Sweating bullets and worrying over configurations of various manners of problems that might waylay my efforts to get from Orlando to Gainesville for the first time in more than 10 years. These are the kinds of things that happen to you…
Surely everyone who has ever picked up a guitar, microphone, or drumstick has fantasised about creating an album revered as a bona fide, epoch-defining classic. The dream of having a collection of songs that are still spoken about in hushed, reverent tones more than two decades after their release is…
Short bursts of off-kilter aggression have yet to go out of style for me. As much as I’ve gravitated toward longer and more complex music, I still periodically revisit my high school affinity for the ’00s mathgrind and noisecore scene. I was addicted to bands like An Albatross, iwrestledabearonce, and…
“I listen to music to get away from politics”. A common comment found on just about every major publication’s share of nearly every band with an actual message outside of “hur hur Cthulu” or “heartbreak is pain and you’re a bitch”. No one takes these people seriously. Especially not Hesitation…
One of the things I’ve come to appreciate about my musical tastes as I go through life is that everything tends to have its own niche often attached to specific feelings and moments. Sometimes those moments, in hindsight, prove acutely painful yet still reveal things I have learned from. One…
Where to start with a traditionally British doom band that have plunged headfirst into a dystopian sci-fi future fitting of the artwork they adorn their debut with? Wallowing’s debut full-length Planet Loss (the band’s first real recording of any merit) jams high-brow concepts of self and humanity’s folly into doom…
The story of foundational punk band, Jawbreaker, is equal parts cautionary tale, mythos, and the brutal reality of the ways in which human relationships tend to disintegrate. Sometimes, though, that disintegration can eventually lead to a resolution that appears unimaginable on the surface. The ostensible “plot” of Don’t Break Down,…
Yes, the title is an Infectious Grooves reference. No, I will never stop using bad puns in this feature. When I first started writing Grind My Gears way back in checks calendar but it doesn’t really matter because time is a man-made construct and bears no real impact on the…
This month, we’re all over the map. Happy, sad, emo, serious, political, and not so, it’s all in here this time around. We’re especially stoked on the albums that came out over the last month and there were more that should have made it in but we had to stop…
One of the great things about following a band throughout the arc of their career is being there for the moments when they hit on periodic successes and evolve over time. On the latest offering from Canadian punk vets, Sum 41, we get a glimpse at their continued growth and…
