Brooklyn indie rock trio, A Great Big Pile of Leaves, will be releasing two new EP’s on November 1st. One EP is titled Live from the Living Room- Volume One, which was recorded in the living room of Motion City Soundtrack keyboardist Jesse Johnson. This is a joint release by Topshelf Records and Pressing Matters, which is run by Johnson. The other is a studio-recorded EP titled Boom, which will be released by Topshelf Records. Both EP’s will have new and re-recorded songs and will be available digitally and on vinyl only.
Posted in Indie Rock
Recommended: wavepool abortion
From damn near out of nowhere (well, Russia actually) comes wavepool abortion (non-capitalization required), an exhilarating wreck of a band that has neither the interest or patience in, say, “building sound sculptures” or “rewarding repeated listening.”
The Russian duo keep the antagonistic spirit of rock alive, in all its celebratory give-a-fuck-ness. This is addition by subtraction, a reductionist equation that hands your ass to you and tosses you out of the sweaty corner dive, covered in alcohol fumes and (mostly) your own blood. The kind of music that used to be whipped up by teenagers with permanently sunken eyes and garages full of amplifiers. The kind of rock that crawls into bed after dawn and can’t get up before 2 pm, staggering back into existence slightly before dusk, looking like a million bucks, if a million bucks dressed in second-hand leather and was badly in need of a hepatitis shot.
Video: Y Luv – “All Night”
Not too long ago, I posted Y Luv‘s “All Night”, a straight-up jam from the Los Angeles based band. The short, infectious track was the single from Y Luv’s newest EP, How Chill Can You Let Go?, and now has a set of visuals that come straight out of Venice Beach. Don’t expect to understand what’s going on in this one, but hey, at least the song’s good, right?
MP3: Y Luv – “All Night”
Girls Play ‘Fallon’
Girls made their first ever TV appearance last night with a late night performance on Fallon, rocking out with a live rendition of Father, Son, Holy Ghost opening track “Honey Bunny”. They also stuck around for a web-exclusive encore performance of power-ballad “My Ma”, also a cut from the band’s new album. Check out both below.
“Honey Bunny”:
“My Ma”:
Father, Son, Holy Ghost was just released on September 12th via True Panther and has already garnered praise from a wide range of sources.
The Second Coming of College Rock: Nu-Gaze Edition

Presented for your consideration today: two fine New Bands whose aural tendencies echo the past, specifically that magical decade or so stretching from 1985-1995, when College Rock was actually a Thing. Good times, those what with talented and possibly drugged up students spinning everything under the sun that would never see the light of day on Top 40 radio.
Jangly arch-country from Camper Van Beethoven rubbing musical elbows with imported British takeover applicants The Charlatans UK (the appended UK gives it away). But first and foremost, atmospheric shoegazer epics drifted across the lower ends of the FM dial, carried by sparse megawattage that nearly allowed the signal to escape the surrounding parking lot.
This was before College Rock morphed into Alternative Rock (aided by MTV), which soon transformed (via the arrival of Nirvana and about a million bandwagon-jumping A&R men) into various shades of grunge, which a half-decade later got drunk and passed out in tattoo shop, awaking only to find itself the inadvertent caretaker of Helmet and Dr. Dre. Once it was discovered that talent skips a generation, this malformed child was christened “Nu-Rock” and abandoned in the care of a million frat boys, each of whom assumed growly yelling was a viable form of artistic expression.
BUT! These two tracks have nothing to do with a decade-long run of strangely earnest guitar wrangling in which louder always = better and melodies were something for the girls to enjoy along with their roofie-laced drinks. These two tracks bring back the “alt” in “altrock,” summoning up the swirling, hazy guitar anti-heroics of a short generation of pedal-pushing geniuses who operated under such unlikely names as My Bloody Valentine, Yo La Tengo, Catherine Wheel and Sonic Youth.