H.D. Harmsen
Papoose

In my eyes, one of the most curious facets of the music business is how certain indie record labels become defined by a sound or how the label itself will come to define its members sounds. It makes sense, of course - no leaps of faith are needed to suspect that a small business would be formed with a group of friends, and it stands to reason that those friends would have similar interests and tastes. Sub Pop cornered the grunge and flannel market in the late 1980s (and later, to a lesser extent, the hipster market in the 00s), Drive-Thru Records hit a vein of pop-punk angst at the turn of the century, and Saddle Creek left their mark with the bloodletting yowls of the vaunted Real Emo. Iowa’s Maximum Ames Records is still in its nascent stages of life, but already they’ve managed to make a stamp without having a Maximum Ames Sound. 70s piano pop (Christopher the Conquered), high-voltage rock and roll (The Poison Control...

Fall Out Boy
Save Rock and Roll

I’ve always wanted to hate Fall Out Boy.

I always felt a little too old for Fall Out Boy. Take This To Your Grave came out when I was already in college, and having wasted my hormonal angst on Goldfinger’s Hang-Ups and a few more embarrassing titles I won’t reveal here, I couldn’t grab onto the over-emoting and spiky pop-punk as easily as I did earlier in life. But, in spite of myself, the live show and a few dramatic moments that coincided with listening to the albums I became a fan. I also quickly realized one of the key tenets of Fall Out Boy - whichever of their albums you love first will be the bar by which you judge the rest of their albums. From Under the Cork Tree sees the band with better riffs, better production, better vocals and better lyrics, but even to this day you’ll find the diehards claiming everything but Take This To Your Grave is utter...

Frightened Rabbit
Pedestrian Verse

At some point in every pseudo-depressive young man’s life, there comes a point where we give up the self-lacerating. To be sure, the excessive alcohol, cigarettes, pills, and revelling in strange women have an allure, as if the slow self-destruction somehow bring us closer to becoming the next coming of Bukowski or Cobain. The odds tell us, however, that most of us will, in fact, not turn into the next great depressive icon. Once we grow out of that extended adolescence that takes up the mid-twenties of so many of us, the women don’t fall for the sullen act anymore, the hangovers last longer, and we start to realize too late that it’s time to grow up.

Frightened Rabbit (and more importantly, Lead Man Scott Hutchinson) came across this point of their career at a unique nexus in time. Hutchinson seemingly had the realization on The Midnight Organ Fight, the album that launched the band to...

Coheed & Cambria
The Afterman: Ascension / Descension

No matter the medium, the best science fiction is always rooted in human emotion. Ripley acting as the mother figure to Newt makes Aliens amazing, and the lack of any human core (amongst other issues) is why there hasn’t been a good Alien movie in decades. Coheed & Cambria know this and have applied this liberally to their wild, overarching tales of spacebound good and evil. The band ran into issues on Year of the Black Rainbow specifically because they seemingly forgot that connection. After all, we wouldn’t have cared one iota about whether or not Claudio Kilgannon saved the universe unless we felt the guilt and the rage over his entire family being brutally slaughtered.

With the duo of Afterman albums, Coheed and Cambria have remembered the necessity of that human link amidst the tales of IRO-Bots and interplanetary destruction. Afterman...

The Bronx
The Bronx (IV)

For the first five years of its existence, Los Angeles’s The Bronx carved its name into a wall of increasingly homogenous so-called punk rock with their own uncompromising brand of violent hardcore. Three eponymous albums later, the band was arguably at the top of their game, but despite winning the hearts and minds of anyone who had the fortune to see or hear the band, they still hadn’t quite broken any sort of glass ceiling. They’d amassed a good following, but they’d not crossed over to larger audiences, and the band seemed to be spinning its wheels. Rather than pull some cliched “indefinite hiatus” out of their asses to explain the lack of new material, the band created an alter ego, Mariachi El Bronx. As one might presume, it was a full blooded mariachi band without a wink to be seen - the group is as serious about mariachi as they are about punk. This group proved to be that hammer taken to the glass ceiling for...

Bad Religion
True North

“It’s OK if you only know three chords, but for God’s Sake, put them in the right order!”

A smarter man than myself once said those words regarding a fictional group of snotty garage punks as voiced by Green Day, but it’s proven to be rather wise. It’s also no more wiser than when applied to the Punk Godfathers in Bad Religion. In the thirty-four years and sixteen studio albums since their inception, they’ve barely changed their approach to music, but somehow, those albums can still vary wildly in quality. Because they’ve not changed the approach in their career, the varying quality likely has to be attributed to the line-up of the band and the inspiration behind it. The group put out some of their best work after founding guitarist Brett Gurewitz returned upon the band’s exile from the majors, all of which happily coincided with the Bush Years.

As happened with The Dissent of...

Dropkick Murphys
Signed and Sealed in Blood

Myself and many others have made multiple references to Dropkick Murphys being the AC/DC of whiskey-soaked Celtic folk-punk, and they wouldn’t be wrong. Do or Die came out in 1998, and aside from a few minor (and one major) line-up changes, the band’s been steam-rolling ever since. For a while, the band made its name on a non-stop touring, hard-charging act that taught skins and young wannabe-punks like myself how to swing a few beers and how to properly circle-pit. They could have earned legendary status within the scene just by keeping that up, but 2006 proved to be a pivotal year for the guys. A key scene from Martin Scorcese’s The Departed featured “I’m Shipping Up to Boston”, and nothing has been the same for the guys. The exposure took the guys to new heights including playing Fenway Park and even performing “Badlands” with The Boss himself.

But even as the guys were...

Iowa City Song Project
Various Artists

In September of 1912, William and Etta Englert built a theatre in downtown Iowa City with the intent of besting the finest movie palaces that had been sprouting up in the booming economy of the early part of the century. The Englert Theatre played a large role in redeveloping the city at the time and would remain a beacon of culture in a town that has had no lack of it. In 1999, the theatre was to be sold, effectively ending the theatre’s monumental status within the city. A group of citizens and local businesses banded together to prevent such events, and in 2004, the Englert Theatre came back stronger than ever and has been as active as ever since that time. Acts ranging from Neko Case to Jeff Tweedy to Yo La Tengo to Greg Brown to Mike Birbiglia to Drive-By Truckers have passed through the theatres doors ever since.

With the theatre back on solid footing, the next logical step would be...

Trash Talk
119

Some years ago, I was able to catch Trash Talk opening for fellow punks The Bronx here in Iowa City. During their all too-too-brief set, vocalist Lee Spielman opened up his forehead with the microphone, let the crowd know that he had the flu (“I feel like shit!”), and managed to spend most of his time in the crowd that culminated in Spielman spearing an unsuspecting concert-goer into the grimy walls of Gabe’s Oasis. Such blood-soaked mayhem occurred in less than thirty minutes, and it proves to be indicative of Trash Talk on the whole. For the past seven years, the Sacrementonians have been slashing and burning their way across the world and back with a completely uncompromising old-school brand of hardcore punk. Awake brought the band much acclaim and truckloads of new eyes and ears, but their recent signing with the perennial shit-starters of Odd Future records and 119 seems proof positive that they’re ready to burn the...

Patterson Hood
Heat Lightning Rumbles in the Distance

Earlier this year, Drive-By Trucker associate / former tour mate Craig Finn took some time off from his day job with The Hold Steady and made one of my favorite albums of the year in Clear Heart Full Eyes. Solo efforts are always a bit of a shaky proposition - usually it means the soloist in question is running on fumes and feels the need to spread his or her creative wings. Sometimes, as is in the case of Mr. Finn and Laura Jane Grace (at the time known as Tom Gabel of Against Me!), it results in a great album that retains what made us love the artist in the first place by subtly tweaking the formula. In other cases like those of, say, the ill-fated KISS solo albums of the late Seventies, you get egotistic messes that have no coherent facets and end, well, with a completely unironic cover of Pinocchio’s “When You Wish Upon A Star”. Patterson Hood’s always been the most prolific of the...

Trouble Lights
The Endless Prom

Back in July, we covered Iowa’s 80/35 music festival and were struck by how many of the highlights of the day went to Iowan-bred bands. Fairfield’s Little Ruckus stole the show at the first of the after-parties, Ames’s Mumford’s tore the afternoon a new asshole, and our old pals in Christopher the Conquered made the leap to the mainstage for one of the most memorable performances in the festival’s history. We talked with most of the bands there from Sweat Power Records and those on Maximum Ames Records, and the overall impression we got was the sense of community between all of the artists despite the crazy differences in music and tone. The Endless Prom by newest MA artist Trouble Lights is further proof of the idea that anything goes in Iowa....as long as it’s good.

To say that...