Graves, Release Your Dead (Svart Records) is the latest album from Finland’s vampire-admiring (maybe “obsessed” is the word) The Coffinshakers. According to the band’s online blurb, they’ve been making horror comedy since 1995. Now if that feels like rather a long time to be riding this fairly simple gimmick, well it’s just a fleeting moment for a night walker, eh?
There’s a bit of a misconception about Bowling For Soup outside of their committed fanbase. Maybe it’s their look, the fact that they’re not über (or even always semi) serious, or maybe it’s the ubiquity of several of the tracks from their Drunk Enough To Dance (Jive Records) smash-hit album that littered our music TV lives throughout the first decade of the twenty-first century, but BFS are rarely given the credit for their song-writing that several of their contemporaries get. Whether you like it or not ‘The Bitch Song’, ‘Punk Rock 101’, ‘Emily’, ‘1985’ and ‘Girl All The Bad Guys Want’ are all bonafide bangers, and an integral part of a pop-Punk soundtrack to our lives. Continue reading
For an album titled True Misery (Wasted State Records), Old Man Lizard never sound like they’re sticks in the mud or total bummers. I mean there are patches of Sabbath gloom all throughout this third LP, but it never reaches Primitive Man suicide watch levels of anguish. And maybe it doesn’t have to either. Continue reading