By Kelly

Published: February 24th, 2007

Brent Green has a melodic voice with a soft-spoken inflection and an articulate delivery that belies that he is, in fact, the narrator of his animated films. Rather, the narrator of Green's shorts does not sound like the soft-spoken, articulate person who is speaking over the phone during the interview, but instead he becomes a fresh-faced and enthusiastic storefront preacher who yells and garbles lines of the story with fervor. Green first began making films when he decided that a story of his, "Susa's Red Ears," would make a good animated film. At the time, he had no drawing or film making experience. After asking a friend who had attended school for comic book drawing, Green set to work on the ...

By Kelly

Published: February 1st, 2007

It's much closer to afternoon than it is to morning on a drizzly Saturday, and the Teeth are just sitting down to breakfast at Billy's Downtown Diner, a Bethlehem eatery with an upscale lighting scheme and a menu to match. For all but drummer Jonas Oesterle, the breakfast in Bethlehem is a bit of a homecoming. Because while the band has long been claimed by Philadelphia as the city's native sons, three of the Teeth—guitarist Brian Ashby and twin brothers guitarist Aaron MoDavis and bassist Peter MoDavis — have always been slouching towards Bethlehem, the town where they lived before heading to Philadelphia to attend college. Since that initial move to Philadelphia six years ago, the four-piece has been on a steady ...

By Kelly

Published: January 19th, 2007

The girls of Dvorak and the Dvotchkas — pianist and singer Leslie Allison, accordion player and vocalist Darri Farr, and cellist Lily Benson — tend to giggle. A lot. It's a trait that, when listening to the band's music, one would not immediately expect. After all, the Haverford-based band (which also includes two male members not present at the interview: saxophonist Will Xiong and bassist and drummer Andrew Dieck) has created a sound that's as comfortable setting the backdrop for a film adaptation of a Dostoevsky novel as it is being played at Philadelphia venues. But it's a sound that could very well be expected from a band that, when asked its influences, name drops 19th century German chancellor, Otto von ...

By Kelly

Published: December 2nd, 2006

Just call June State Residential the comeback kids. After struggling for years, it seems that the Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania-based band may have finally found its footing.Beginning with a high school venture called End of a Dream, the band eventually splintered into two different outfits: Audio Recording Club and Metro Sound Circuit, the band that would later evolve into June State Residential. The former was successful and able to play shows frequently despite a near-constant member rotation. The latter, though successful in their own right, was not able to play through the loss of several members. After only a few months, the band decided to take a hiatus to regroup. This regrouping, however, did not last; they lasted only a handful ...

By Kelly

Published: October 9th, 2006

It's hard enough for a band to find reasonable success while upholding some shoestring semblance of indie cred. But it's even harder for that band to take a hiatus mid-upswing, plummet into obscurity (or a practice space), and emerge with fanfare provided by the lone horns of a new name and a new album. For Neo Nouveau, though, the second try might turn out better than the first. Originally playing under the moniker of Holiday, the Providence, RI four-piece made its musical mark by playing rather Californian-catchy, sunny songs chilled by the band's hometown New England winds. This unusual take on a simple formula—and the inherently universal catch all-quality of pop music—helped place the band on show bills as opening acts ...

By Kelly

Published: August 21st, 2006

Band names are usually last-minute creations slapped together moments before the big first gig; in the case of Mitch Fiction & the Shits, though, the name of the band existed even before the actual lineup did. The moniker is a throwback to the 1950s (when band names like Buddy Holly & the Crickets were common) blended with tongue-in-cheek wit (there is no real Mitch) and some outright profanity (bassist Andrew Jones censors the name on phone calls with his mother). It's a creation so, well, creative that the credit for its inception is a debated: Jones credits guitarist Rory Connell with the idea, but guitarist Rick Flom attributes it to former member Doug Kirby. But even though the originator of the ...

By Kelly

Published: August 1st, 2006

Most often, the best music is not on the hyped band's debut album, but on the wholly unexpected-to-be-so-damn-good underdog's soggy EP, so when a band hails from a country that has yet to turn into a beehive for buzz bands, it might be time to take a glance at what might be happening.At least that's the case for Dustveil, who call the oft ignored (well, at least musically) Russia home. Dustveil do draw some influence from fellow countrymen who have created a genre-of-sorts called "Russian rock," something that vocalist and guitarist Alexei Leonov (whose bandmates include flutist Nikolai Knyazkov, guitarist Alexander Markov, and bassist Ivan Tumakov) describes as the result of Soviet-era imitations of popular acts like the Bee Gees ...

By Kelly

Published: July 7th, 2006

It was in 1972 that Lincoln Mayorga, a pianist, composer, and conductor who had worked with the broad spectrum of easy-listening superstars (as well as the occasional rocker),decided to make his feelings a bit more public . He released Missing Linc, a record that was intended to be something of a subtle statement against stereophonic recordings. When the stereophonic recording (or stereo, as it was later abbreviated) was originally introduced in 1958, it held a promise to create a better quality of recording with sound more akin to that of a live performance. But it was a promise that had been left unfulfilled; stereo had essentially done the opposite of what it was intended to do. The creation of stereo ...

By Kelly

Published: June 9th, 2006

When it comes to hype--that bloody creation of the music press--it is almost never good, and it is certainly always a bitch. This is the one thing that plucks unsuspecting fledgling bands from the garage of obscurity and places them (and their thrift store duds) on the cover of The Fader or can file their shit-recorded LP under "Pitchfork: Best New Music." And a band so fully armed with a bevy of listen-to-us gimmicks like ¡Forward, Russia! is engineered for this hype machine: Their name has punctuation that could be lifted from a Tom Wolfe novel (though, the first punctuation mark may be dropped); they hail from Leeds, the Brit music scene hotbed dubbed "New Yorkshire"; their songs boast of ...

By Kelly

Published: May 18th, 2006

It seems that too often, music writers make a point to do a witty tiptoe around a rather simple fact: If a pop song is good, it's a good pop song. And that's been the case for Los Angeles trio The Green and Yellow TV who have crafted albums filled with good pop songs. The Green and Yellow TV have been making good pop from the get-go. Formed in the late 1990s, the band released their first LP, As Performed By, in 2000 that declared their proclivity for bouncy jams laced with multiple-part harmonies and unrelenting hooks. The Green and Yellow TV hint at everything from The Beatles (of course) and The Beach Boys (not surprising), but also fit a few ...

By Kelly

Published: May 8th, 2006

Every aspect of Los Angeles seems exaggerated, so it was no surprise that when the SoCal city hit its musical stride a few years back, it was--well--pretty overdone. Native sons like Rooney and Phantom Planet played power pop with plenty of power and certainly plenty of pop; the songs were heavily hooked with the catchy choruses and the sunny sounds that redefined the definition of California sound. But soon, everything just became a bit too sunny. So, now when a band like Army Navy breaks out of L.A. with the musical pallor of sun-deprivation, it's hard not to take notice. The quartet plays with the same pop exuberance of their fellow L.A.-ers, but in the understated, melancholic way of Brit-rockers like ...

By Kelly

Published: April 30th, 2006

When it comes to classifying a band's music, it seems to be that everybody's go-to-genre is "unclassifiable." Very seldom, though, does that title actually fit. For the Miami duo, Awesome New Republic, it might just be about right. Comprised of Brian Robertson and Michael-John Hancock (who met while students at University of Miami School of Music), the band doesn't pull that same simple, stripped-down trick that most twosomes so often do. Instead, ANR rely on something almost unexpected from a pair: they create songs that are complex, intricate, and downright lush. Much of this complexity, intricacy, and downright lushness is due to the band's frequent genre-hopping. ANR takes bits and pieces to make nips and tucks at the seams of dance, ...