Album Review: Middle Class Rut

Album Review: Middle Class Rut
Album: No Name, No Colour
Label: Bright Antenna

If you need a modern musical definition of the word ‘cohones’, then look no further than the sound of Middle Class Rut. No Name, No Colour is one hell of a ballsy recording, made even more astounding by how such a gigantic sound has come from just two members – Zack Lopez and Sean Stockham are making a case for being one of the loudest duets in rock at the moment.

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Album Review: Tera Melos

Album Review: Tera Melos
Album: Patagonian Rats
Label: Sargent House

Patagonian Rats is a complex beast. Vastly ambitious, it’s hard to pin down a particular sound that these boys from Roseville, California have aimed for. If anything, they’ve taken a whole concoction of musical ingredients and stirred them up into an album that is haunting, enticing, and most of the time, engrossing.

Album Review: Electric Six

Album Review: Electric Six
Album: Zodiac
Label: Metropolis

Electric Six are the ultimate party band. With a vocalist called Dick Valentine, and the rest of the band sharing names such as Rock and Roll Indian, Disco and Percussion World, they’ve carved an effective niche in throwing together the usually disastrous combination of comedy and rock ­– Spinal Tap excluded, naturally.

Album Review: Ex Libras

Album Review: Ex Libras
Album: Cut(s)
Label: Wirebird

Late last year Ex Libras received The Line of Best Fit’s coveted recommended tag for their debut release Suite(s), a brilliant album forged in a garden shed, like all good British inventions. But the shed hasn’t remained dormant, culminating in Cut(s), an acoustic addendum to the well-received full length.

EP Review: Torche

EP Review: Torche
EP: Songs for Singles
Label: Hydra Head

Torche took a massive step forward on 2008’s Meanderthal, which boiled down their previous rough ‘n’ ready EPs and albums into a much more refined take on the stoner rock genre that the band inhabit wholesomely. Though Songs for Singles isn’t a full-length follow up to that cracking album it is an encouraging preview of things to come.

Album Review: Oceansize

Album Review: Oceansize
Album: Self Preserved While the Bodies Float Up
Label: Superball

Giving an opinion on an Oceansize album is a difficult job. If Everyone Into Position was their attempt at pleasing the masses (and it was) then follow-up Frames was a band unleashed into the wild, attempting to do everything within the space of 50 minutes, resulting in an incoherent album that had peaks, but often languished in overzealous ambition.

EP Review: Tubelord

EP Review: Tubelord
EP: Tezcatlipōca
Label: Hassle

Our First American Friends was a wildly popular record among rock critics despite the fact that it was everything you would have thought a self-respecting rock critic would detest: animated, cheerful and coming across like the wet daydreams of a Michael Cera character. But it was undeniably brilliant in its own idiosyncratic manner.