Modest Mouse mastermind Isaac Brock is definitely on to something with his current side project, Ugly Casanova. At first glance, this comes as something of a shock – a backwoods stew that’s equal parts Tom Waits and Mellow Gold-era Beck shouldn’t be MORE accessible than your everyday guitar rock – but after a few listens, the shambling lyrics and eclectic instrumental palate will grow on you in a way not unlike the alien plant roots depicted on the album cover. From the spoon-based percussion on “Spilled Milk Factory” to the thoroughly bizarre, Talking Heads march of “Parasites” (“the parasites are excited when you’re dead/eyes bulging/entering your head”), Ugly Casanova exhibit a unique kitchen-sink sensibility that is both curious and charming. Perhaps the appeal lies somewhere between the layers of backwards guitar loops and washboard drumming, a thread interwoven with fret noises and gurgled vocals. One way or another, the collage is captivating. Ugly Casanova’s debut offers a simple, handmade beauty that is so often absent from “modern rock.” Brock and associates have conjured up a humble mix of experimentation and rootsy tradition that – while not for everyone – offers a welcome respite from your typical three or four chords. [www.subpop.com]

As you know if you have read just about anything I have written on this fair site, I am not really into R&B or Hip Hop. So why am I reviewing this album then? Because when I do come across something in this genre that I really enjoy, I feel that it is my duty to let you know about it. “I, John” is just different enough for me to get into, and give me something to break the rock and punk monotony that typically plagues my CD changer. On songs like “Trouble Again” Forte manages to incorporate a nice little guitar riff with his smooth vocal stylings (not to mention guest vocals from Tricky) to create a strikingly catchy track. Then we have “All the Pretty People” in which the incorporation of a piano and slow vocal delivery creates an almost Elton John-ish feel. You can’t say that too often about a song by an R&B artist. Combine these tracks with “Been There, Done That” which has a straight up rock n’ roll chorus, guitar solo, and keyboards and you have one of the best combination of styles I have heard in a while. I guess that is what draws me to this album; it is so diverse and such a great mix of different styles. It becomes clear that many different types of music have had an influence on John Forte and these influences shine through on “I, John”. All the while Forte manages to include his own unique touch on the music that seems to be rooted in his diverse musical background. Another noticeable point is the quality of the lyrics. Forte made this album in the months after his trial and conviction for drug possession, and preceding his 14-month jail sentence. As a result, we get this album full of strikingly honest lyrics about the hard times Forte is facing, as well as the positive things down the road. All in all, that makes for good music. So have you heard the new Wyclef album? It is kind of disappointing isn’t it? Well then go out and pick up the John Forte album, “I, John”. The album has a very similar feel to Wyclef’s material but offers a little more of a soul sound and a lot more diversity. I think with this release Forte has proved that he has a lot to offer the music world, and not just as a guest on his buddy’s album. I give the album a solid 4.4 manstyle points. [www.transparentmusic.com]

Pop. I would love to think this three-letter palindrome has grown out of its old skin as an associate with bleak and uninspiring popular rubbish. I would love to think that it has become known as a genre of universal emotional connectivity rather than a procured scene of prepubescent bubble-gummed infestation. However, this is simply not true. Most of rock’s patrons still ignorantly create a deceptive lineage from pop to MTV and radio. Although it most definitely is a pipe dream, the emotional pop telegraphers of Azure Ray want to change all that. Burn and Shiver, this female duo’s sophomoric heart thumper and brain sweller, blows through the abysses that pop music should emulate: plains of atmospheric flourishes, rolling hills of silky smooth production and mountains of climatic crescendos. Yes, Azure Ray are more of a photographic landscape than a cold clinical cut of plastic. They know that the plush horns that sound off in the distance and the sensitive synthesizers that tremble like a wavering spring breeze on “Forever Cities” and the acoustics that drip with a sweet jangle on “Trees Keep Growing” aren’t going to crush the musical template; or even make a dent in it, for that matter. But that’s not saying that tears won’t be shed, emotion won’t be blossomed and love won’t be spread by this dyad. Trust me – I witnessed it firsthand. Azure Ray – while wrestling with topics of love and ruffling the feathers of loneliness – warp their subject matter into a surprisingly content craft of pure pop goodness. Although apt to both celebrate life and its virtues while being prone to the sadness and its tribulations along the way, Burn and Shiver rests its head on complacency at the end of the day. The soft ethereal touches of femininity that lull atop a warm, hazy backdrop of drifting life will definitely not alter the world – but if it makes you think a little longer and feel a little more does it even matter? [www.thewarmsupercomputer.com]

And you say... She was just a one-hit wonder. She whined so all the time... So? She's still singing, that canary that is Lisa Loeb; Her newest release, Cake and Pie, is a cheerfully inoffensive miasma of heartache, sing-a-long, and finger-picked tuneage that is sincere and bittersweet. Well put-together like a teenager going out on her first date, it's a very pink-toned album, with swirly and warm guitars, wispy background voices, and Lisa's delicate yet one-octave voice. The album reeks of familiarity, yet it's more like a comforting familiarity than anything else. The lyrics are easy to understand, and the emotions behind them are equally easy to get, underscored by a rasp here or a nice bass line there. Every song could potentially be a hit, could potentially be a soundtrack staple, as they're all likeable and effortless to listen to. So what's wrong with our cat-eyed heroine of "Reality Bites"? Not a thing has changed, really, since her last efforts. It's all too easy, like a paint-by-numbers kit, where your mind doesn't get any room to explore the songs, because she makes sure that her neurosis is just that, hers. It's too sweet to properly trash, as "Drops Me Down" is too quickly catchy, "Everyday" is too easily singable, and "Kick Start" is too nicely put; good at the hook, she is. "Payback" has a surprising malice that someone who names their album after sugary confections might just have the irony to spare, and "You Don't Know Me" is Bob Seager's quiet, book-smart daughter's story. In essence, the album is something you'd actually hold onto, because you might be in the mood to be told what to think about things someday... Things that you'd already overhashed anyway, so it's so much easier to have someone with Lisa's lip-gloss voice sing about them. Or maybe not. "She's Falling Apart" is the only ominious song, the only song that might have taken some courage to write, as it's a chronicle of anorexia, and it's steady pace hints at more autobiography than Miss L might want to reference. So if you get in the mood for a chorus that goes "Lalalalala...Lalalalala..." then this album is, with all its ABAB, CDCD rhyme scheme, for you. [www.lisaloeb.com]

There’s got to be something in the water in Omaha. Or maybe it’s just the desolate Bible-belt upbringings or the ceaseless cornrows that induce creation out of monotony. Despite what the cause is – the ardent musical fever does in fact spread like wildfire in that certain eastern Nebraska city. And lucky for all of us roving music fanatics, Saddle Creek Records have honed their perceptiveness and sharpened their ears to give the fine musicians of Omaha an outlet into the world. Adjoining the ranks of the Saddle Creek elite are Mayday – folk rock regulars that send a trail of tears down the melancholic page of the classic rock textbook. Though the official moniker of Mayday may be new to indie name-swappers, such names as Lullaby for the Working Class, Cursive, Bright Eyes and Azure Ray are not. Ted Stevens, the mastermind and orchestrater of Mayday, endows his voice box for the famed tunesters in Lullaby for the Working Class and has previously enlisted in the eminence of the remaining few listed. And now, after sifting through years of amounting demo material he emerges with an album – Old Blood, the brainchild of Stevens that weeps, laments and swaggers in the way that old fashioned folksters use to rock it with only the best of their friends. Mayday pieces together the usual entanglement of proto-folk rock through the twang of a banjo [“Captain”], the crinkle of an ethereal distortion pedal [“Come Home”] and the glazing dichotomy of hauntingly torrid male/female whispers [“I Know Moonlight”]. However, Mayday captures its swirl of solitude and desperation of distanced hope most awe-inspiringly in the dream catcher entitled “Cinquefoils.” Through the tick-tocking drum murmurs that mirror a poetic heartbeat, trembling organ underscores and deep emotive plucks, Mayday entrances the mind and prods at the nervous system in captivating fragility that could only be done by the strokes of the adept. Old Blood exerts heart-bulging heaps of emotion through a kaleidoscope of guitars and its cousins as well as keys from pianos, organs and any other instrument Stevens can construe among the porous textures of Mayday. Although not groundbreaking or overtly precarious, Mayday does etch its name into the indie folk side of rock as a modern bookmark explicating the past while leaving the door ajar just enough for a bit of swelling experimentation. [www.saddle-creek.com]

In 1991 it happened to Nirvana. Nevermind transfixed the lingering bad dream of ‘80s spandex slathered hair metal, fractured pop culture in two and has since certified walls of platinum records. Again, in 1997, rock was reupholstered by five Oxford boys who had an illusory vision and a quixotic dream. They named it OK Computer; yet most of us called it magic. Although each band has carved a very dissimilar musical niche into the hearts of the rock camaraderie, they both share the impeccable reputation as being the musical archetype in their respective native lands for many subsequent years that followed their albums of the highest tier. Doves, with their debut disc of Lost Souls, were an exemplar that tucked beneath the warm bed of rock perfunctory that Radiohead had first stitched and tailored. Just as the title to the aforementioned album indicates, it was an enveloping rock endeavor that was sealed and stamped with deep, impassioned melancholy. As if deliberately leading critics and fans awry, The Last Broadcast perplexes the rock canvas with a sea of sonic landscaping that stretches as far as the ear can hear and celestial harmonies that evaporate from the speakers and solidify in your mind. With their new episodic template, Doves flow through the chasms of your mind rather than simulate their UK predecessor in a game of follow the leader musical mimicry. Their kick-starter, “Words,” drives with vortexes of sheering guitar handiwork that roves like a tidal wave awash a starlit sky. The tinkling bells seem to roar, the vocals drift aimlessly into the night and the drums tremble beneath the shuffling sonic feet. If this were the new facade of the Doves I would be ever so ecstatic. But this isn’t the new polychromatic facelift of the Doves – yet I am still spinning The Last Broadcast ‘round and ‘round, again and again. The truth is, Doves morph and shape shift from song to song – strumming sunny and pruned pop melodics on “There Goes the Fear” one minute while “N.Y.” flaps in the wind with wings of protruding rock charisma and ambient, uplifting swirls that don’t only fill time, but passages of space as well. With The Last Broadcast we witness a band that once concealed its true self in a cocoon of bashfulness now in the formative stages of emerging like the fluttering butterfly that we all knew it could metamorphose into. Doves, with a montage of beautifully orchestrated rock, weave the networks of your mind in a foreign, yet warm fashion to leave you teary eyed, breathless and, as always, yearning for more. Unlike its precursor in the Doves discography, The Last Broadcast stands on a pedestal proudly its own – boasting a main course of beauty with a miniscule side dish of foregoing musical footnotes. [www.doves.net]

Sure, about every review from here to the subterranean dancefloors where Radio 4 submerge their unformulaic pop beneath transcendent keyboards and fractured guitar attritions has accredited their band’s aural infrastructure on Mission of Burma and Gang of Four. But, Radio 4 have seen the future and they simple have no time to dawdle on past Brit-trends – this eclectic quintet is the voyeur of next millennia noise. Gotham!, Radio 4’s bustling sophomore effort, itches with ice-pick-like guitar textures and pounds with floor rippling bass groovenetics. It rocks enough to appeal to the emanation of new school post-punkers, jives enough to be dished out on the dancefloor and agitates enough to cause an invigorating cerebrum-riot in the pensive minded. And, frankly, Radio 4 is just plain cool enough to be detected by anyone with sensible musical intuition. Now disregard Radio 4 with any antecedents; for they are the wax that puts the iridescent glow on all the spacecrafts of the future. Spiking the palatable punch bowl of reversionary disco aesthetics and retro new wave with guitars that resemble shards of glass; the strident and luminous opener, “Our Town,” zealously fills the awkward gray void between key gnashers, club goers and static distortion-aires. The instant that this track lashes out in nihilistic keyboard fury, you realize Radio 4’s auditory earthquakes do in fact pulse to familiar beat; but that is to the beat only heard in the space stations that orbit Mars or in the catacombs of a dance party on Venus. In earthly terms, this means the fun and new wave nostalgia that perspires from the dancefloor deviants in the Faint or Primal Scream’s XTRMNTR disc – the modern Magellan of electronica-guitar exploration. Routered with guitars that stick to your mind like a hyperbolic case of static cling and anchored by bottom heavy synths, Gotham! concentrates its catharsis upon the cornerstone of life. Throwing out the fabrication that any commix of electro-fusion has to be filled under the “cold” and “detached” tag, Radio 4 bombard the sweat drenched dancefloor with breakbeats brimming with vivacity and animated icebergs of white noise that pounce with fierce life. Radio 4 should be the next signal transmitted to reach alien life because, at the very least, Gotham! is going to be charted as the first intergalactic album to rock all forms of life – despite what cosmos you call fly back to at the end of the day. [www.r4ny.com]

In the world of hardcore where excommunication will ensue if Hatebreed doesn’t reap your headphones and thudding monotony is the most consequential auditory asset; I love the Blood Brothers. While retaining the utmost integrity for their mothering sanction of hardcore, this Seattle rooted quintet trembles through polychromatic punk waves to incorporate more style oscillations and genre transpositions than Hatebreed does guitar chords. In the few short years since this five-some has begun demolishing PA systems and treading hardcore’s fixated moniker through genre eclecticism; the Blood Brothers have captivated everyone from basement stage frequenters to uber-producer Ross Robinson. Their most current aural cannonball into the pool of hardcore stagnancy, March on Electric Children, resembles what that h-word would sound like if fun were an epigram for the genre instead of hatred and if melody was filtered through the screams with invariant intensity. While the versatility of the noisecore assassins in Racebannon can exhaust even the most experienced scenester, the Blood Brothers practice the equivalent prowess without fatiguing to a formulaic equation. The energy comprised within March on Electric Children bursts at the disc’s seams, much like Amen’s punk compacted discography. Moreover, as the dual vocal protocol has been trodden into insincerity by the likes of pop regurgitators Linkin Park and Crazy Town, the Blood Brothers instill esteemed hardcore abrasions while extracting energy from every genre willing to be branded with such a proverb. In verifying that fun and intelligent hardcore are indeed not oxymorons, the Blood Brothers inject antibiotics of shredded guitar angularity, but the syringe in which it is delivered through is anything but the typical hardcore requisite. In fact, as the guitars position themselves as six stringed wrecking balls, their havoc as an instrument is felt on a minor scale with the much broader spectrum being the ground zero of innovation where styles clash and interests contrast. And that makes all the difference in the world. March on Electric Children stands as an incendiary voice advocating that avant-garde sensibilities can and will be mingled with rigid hardcore ideals. The Blood Brothers even sink their tenacious teeth into fuzzed out sequencers [“Kiss of the Octopus”] and the lone dissonance of a piano that coupled with anarchic and fevered vocals revs enough RPMs to overturn the obstinate hardcore benchmark in an instant [“American Vultures”]. Sure, this album sprints by in a mere 24 minutes, but not before imploding your mind, pulsing adrenaline to every artery in your bloodstream and emerging from the shackles of hardcore’s “tough guy” motif. March on Electric Children is the modern montage of the new hardcore subversion. [www.thebloodbrothers.com]

If you are the type of autocratic music fanatic that I am, you know that there are a handful of albums that simply must be pushed to eleven on the standardized volume parameter. These records scream and squawk to be dispensed at volumes that raise the temperature, annoy the neighbors and peel the paint off your wall – yes, the very elements that make rock music actually rock. Now that you are in the headache-hinting, pressure-pumping frame of mind, let me properly introduce the Catheters – Subpop’s long awaited answer to the fallout of early ‘90s noise from Mudhoney and Nirvana. Similarly, there is an exclusive anthology of albums that reek with good-natured-fun; the kind of record that resisting its screech of energy and influx of party predilections whenever and wherever it slithers past your ears is futile. Dangerously enough, the Catheters implode, explode, claw, squeal, fight, punch, kick and scream in proving that they are in fact the leading protagonist for both denominations of fun and amplification. And if you shivered at the very context of their moniker, chances are that you just pained an apt reaction to the dangerous rock clamor that the Catheters boldly sketch into their sophomore bombshell, Static Delusions and Stone-Still Days. But don’t worry – this catheter may go down hard, loud and violent; but it sounds like heavenly bliss. As for their exact sound, think MC5’s vintage, dirty and untreated garage physique. Think Unwound’s wide-eyed craze for mayhem. Think Mudhoney’s disorderly disposition. Think the Hives with balls the size of Jupiter. Or just imagine a car crash of electric guitars, snare bantering that rivals the clank of a sledgehammer and swirling shout-along choruses that make every former rocker jump out of that smug, docile and totally submissive sweater for the torn jeans and washed up Stooges t-shirt. The Catheters stab the corpse of all the noisemakers in the past three decades with a knife so serrated and so obliquely jagged that cuts will harm your ears forever and never ever let you perceive sound the same again. When hopefuls such as the Hives and the White Stripes are busy with murderously prolific record label pacts, MTV scarred events and enough media hype to fuel a rocket to the out portions of the universe; the Catheters were too busy making real garage rock to care. In a just world, the Catheters would be on the cover of Rolling Stone, “Been There Before” would be tearing out car stereo systems everywhere and this rambunctious Seattle quartet would be standing on a secular pedestal above 99.7% of rock’s most virtuous. Sadly, however, don’t expect this revolution to subvert the masses anytime soon. And even if it did, it’s not as if anyone anywhere would be ready for it; but I’m willing to do my part and so should you. If the proper respects are paid, Static Delusions and Stone-Still Days should be the Fun House for our generation. This release is for everyone. This is for those vinyl elitists who believe CDs are a prosaic and sterile medium scrubbed with too much hospital-clean production, it’s for those who ever picked up a guitar and cranked out their own noise in a local garage and it’s for everyone who wondered where rock went after MTV’s reign of terror and radio’s immoral archetypes. And if you still don’t slide into one of those denominations – yes, it’s for you too; no one should let Static Delusions and Stone-Still Days glide by unnoticed. This is a band that uses music’s primordial sticks and stones to break your bones rather than mixing boards and ProTools. And that’s the kind of pain that I’m dying to hear. [www.thecatheters.com]