album

TEST SPIN: Two Inch Astronaut — Personal Life

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American DIY music is squarely in the era of Exploding in Sound Records. The Boston-born, Brooklyn-based label has quickly evolved into the premier tastemaker among a certain crowd with a certain sound, claiming a massive range of artists spanning from Big Ups to Palehound. And let’s not forget the integral hand Exploding in Sound played in launching the careers of Speedy Ortiz, Porches. and LVL UP. Just two weeks after releasing Washer’s stellar Here Comes Washer — and two weeks ahead of a slated Kal Marks drop — EIS is making ripples with a new Two Inch Astronaut record, Personal Life.

Arts & Culture

TEST SPIN: Sleater Kinney—No Cities To Love

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Sleater-Kinney, the radical DIY punk rock trio hailing from the riot grrrl scene of Olympia, Washington, was a defining group in rock and roll throughout the nineties and early 2000’s. Punk queens Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein (star of IFC’s Portlandia) got their start at Evergreen College screaming about various isms, and subsequently developed into one of the most acclaimed all-female rock groups of all time. Their notorious hiatus finally came to an end after nine years last Tuesday with the release of their eighth studio album No Cities To Love: a hiatus which has paralleled debatably some of the most precarious years for the genre of rock and roll in history. To make one thing clear, rock is not dead — the click-bait eulogizing of entire musical genres being one of the worse hobbies of pseudo-intellectual music bloggers but it has undeniably taken on new shapes in recent years. However, the girls are back in town and No Cities To Love takes us back to a more political and arguably a more dynamic moment in rock and roll, in disarmingly inventive ways.

Arts & Culture

TEST SPIN: Foxing — Dealer

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By MAX VAN ZILE

Foxing’s Dealer is a thoroughly toothless record, a set of non-obtrusive songs that resists close attention. Since it aims for  —  and mostly hits  —  a tone of subdued prettiness, the record is never unpleasant to listen to, but it fails to engage the listener. Moreover, both the sensitive, self-consciously emotional lyrics and the vocal performance by lead singer Conor Murphy are vaguely irritating. This is an uninspired listen, but it does have its moments of melody: Dealer, therefore, is a record ideally suited as background music, a record that suffers with increased scrutiny. The band themselves are a five-piece from St.

Arts & Culture

A Chat with Local Punkers, why+the+wires

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By MIKE SOSNICK

The Sun spoke with David Nutt, why+the+wires’ vocalist and guitarist, about what it’s like to make and perform post-punk grooves in Ithaca. The Sun: How did why+the+wires come into existence? David Nutt: Kevin Dossinger (saxophone, accordion) and his wife Haley (violin) had been playing in the scruffy punky acoustic band Idatel in the mid-aughts. Shortly after Idatel fell apart, I moved to the area and the three of us decided to jury-rig something together in the summer of 2008.  We roped in Chris Romeis (drums) and eventually bassist Tito Butler.

Arts & Culture

“All Cool Girls Have Bangs”: Waxahatchee at the Haunt

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I walked into the Haunt on a school night stressed, irritated and wishing I’d stayed in instead of spending a good hour securing a ride and a companion to go see, what I was pretty certain, would be a perfectly pleasant and perfectly missable indie rock show: Waxahatchee. Missable, I mean, in the relative sense, that this is Ithaca, where a line-up as stacked as Monday night’s is not all that remarkable. Ithaca spoils us with such an unrelenting stream of incredible music flooding the bars and basements that my calibration is warped — must-see’s become missable, missables become flimsy “attends” on Facebook, and it ends up being a somewhat monumental feat to get myself out to a group I’ve never heard of before. What I mean to say is, if Waxahatchee is here one month, Angel Olsen or Girlpool or Kurt Vile or Sharon Van Etten will be the next. The crowd, looking like a Portlandia episode, was predictable; I figured the music would be too.