Latest Posts

Turnover at the Town Ballroom (11/13/17)

Last week, Turnover made their triumphant return to Buffalo in support of their new album, Good Nature.  The band managed a surprisingly great turnout at the Town Ballroom after the closure of the Waiting Room, causing the show to move locations.  They cruised through a handful of tracks off of their past two records, and with the help of Pronoun and Elvis Depressedly, made for a killer show overall.  Check out some photos from the night below, shot be blog photographer, Brendan O’Connor. Elvis Depressedly Turnover

The Bandcamp Era

Car Seat Headrest recently rolled out a “Greatest Hits” of sorts. Well, the bandcamp lo-fi version of what a greatest hits compilation would be. The album is called Teens of Style and it raises at least a couple of interesting questions: What do we do with all this lo-fi music laying around Bandcamp that previously independent artists released, now that those artists are being signed? What does this mean on a greater scale, for artists and fans, as windows like Bandcamp are becoming a standard within certain genres? There have been a lot of irrelevant questions posed to these guys from different angles, mostly pertaining to the “pressures” of having a wider audience, having to work with other people, and all kinds of ridiculous questions that really stereotype people like Will Toledo (Car Seat Headrest) and Mat Cothran (Elvis Depressedly) as introverted guys who wouldn’t know how to make or perform[...]

The Front Bottoms

The Front Bottoms carry the unique ability to put listeners through the emotional wringer and have them come out on the other side embracing a limitlessly carefree attitude. Through charm, wit, innuendo, pointed imagery and melodies that nest themselves neatly in your ears for a seemingly infinite amount of time, this four piece has been able to use that ability to develop into a captivating indie-pop force. The band’s recent full length release, Back On Top, is somewhat of a power statement. It’s undoubtedly different than previous releases but it still retains the same characteristics mentioned above. Even people who initially expressed reservation toward the album have come to love it in some way — in almost an exclusive, “this album was written for me” type of way. Tunes like “West Virginia” and “Cough It Out” showcase the creative risks the band is taking instrumentally and melodically, but there’s still this inherent somber hopefulness[...]

Elvis Depressedly at the Space (7/18/15)

Minutes into his set Saturday night in Hamden, Connecticut, Mathew Cothran, mic chord snaked around his hands and neck, asked the crowd at the Space if they were into prophecy. He then launched into a bunch of authoritative lines that seemed like he was performing an exorcism. Cothran’s project, Elvis Depressedly, mixed introspective lyrics with a more high powered edge than the way the songs appear on his album, this year’s New Alhambra, which is in part an homage to the arena that used to host ECW wrestling. The songs are fairly downcast, reminiscent of early Bright Eyes, mixing refined production linked together with obscure samples of muddled dialogue. On stage, Cothran prowls around while the four members of his band bring his songs to life. Barely any of his songs hit three minutes, but he went the distance for each one, holding the mic with a vice grip and[...]