Articles by Alfonso Manosalvas
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New Girls on the Block
Don't let the name fool you. Girl In a Coma isn't named for some misogynist rocker's girlfriend, they're not another band of wrist cutters playing dirge-like psycho electronica nor another Smiths-obsessed band. Well, maybe ... -
Real Estate's Better Days
Straight outta Ridgewood, New Jersey, yo, that prosaic hotbed of upscale suburban sprawl, comes Days, the second helping from indie band Real Estate (out today on Domino Recording). Ridgewood is no Silver Lake or Seattle in terms of music ... -
The Whole Shebang
When the bits and bytes start cooking and The Whole Love’s first couple of bars issue forth from your speakers, you'll be forgiven for thinking you're listening to new Radiohead instead of new Wilco. In some respects the bands are worlds apart, ... -
Cause for Applause
The back story for Clap Your Hands Say Yeah reads like an old Sonic Youth album title: Kill Yr Idols. About a million years ago (2005), CYHSY came on like the best thing since weed vaporizers. The blogerrati created a deafening hype surrounding ... -
Things Go BOOM
Wild Flag run their eponymous album up the flagpole today (on Merge Records), surrendering their long-awaited collabo with a rollicking good-time rock album from this premiere girl supergroup. What, you may ask, is a girl supergroup? You take two ... -
What's Happening?
Chelsea Wolfe is a California girl but she’s not that kind of sunny, beach bunny sort of California girl – she's from up north, where stands of redwoods darken the landscape and gun-running, meth-making biker gangs and Charlie Mansons grow like ... -
Fools Gold Keeps It Real
There's no shortage of artists who have dabbled in, or fully taken up, the Afro-beat mantle, including Paul Simon, Vampire Weekend, Foals and, again on their second release, Fool's Gold. First reviewed here two years ago for their debut album, ... -
Oh, The Horrors
Forgive The Horrors for kicking past the punk, mascara-wearing, Cramps-sounding, goth-vampirosity of their first album, Strange House and the art-damaged, Mercury-nominated left turn of their second album, Primary Colours. Don’t fault them ... -
Breathing Fire
Hailing from that unstoppable, fertile, hotbed of contemporary music, Sweden’s Little Dragon drop their third LP today on Peacefrog Records/EMI. Ritual Union continues their aural perambulations through electronic music, hot R&B, funk, pop and ... -
From Alaska, With Love
Slide over, Sarah Palin – you're not the only media darling from Wasilia, anymore. Although Portugal. The Man now hang their hats in Portland, Oregon, the band's first stomping ground was Palinville, Alaska; and if you’ve caught the ... -
The Summer of Our Lives
Whatever happened to the days when a reviewer was able to triangulate a certain sound to a certain city – like, trace a line from grunge to Portland or hair bands to L.A., for instance? It seems as if these days the globe is peppered with pockets of ... -
C’mon, Feel the Japanoise
Famously named for a song by the infamous Melvins, Boris is a power trio of doom rockers – let’s call them experimental music artists – who have, with Attention Please, turned their customary blend of pounding rock, thrash ... -
Ready to Burst
Is there any living space left for hipster bands in Brooklyn? For their first album, Hospice, The Antlers inhabited a hospital room (a metaphorical one, anyway) that housed the conceit for singer/songwriter Peter Silberman’s tale of an ... -
Not Like the Other Girls
Vivian Girls have always been a blender full of punk-rock, Phil-Spector-girl-group, art-damaged-rock and girl-wants-what-girl-wants ethos, but the hardcore propulsion that jerked and strutted through their first two albums has been eased out of the mosh ... -
Fire Up the Delorean
Although Cold Cave's second proper album, Cherish the Light Years, sounds like the best 80s electro-pop album you never heard, it is in fact here and now – and new, so to speak – courtesy of Matador Records. The brainchild of ... -
The Way of the Dodo
Consider the onslaught of the two-man band: Wye Oak (reviewed here last week), Matt & Kim, She and Him, The Black Keys, MGMT (when they're not touring), Broken Bells, Sleigh Bells, and on and on and on. Are bands going the way of ... -
The Quiet Giant
The now-vanquished Wye Oak was a four-centuries-old specimen of arboreal magnificence known as The Quiet Giant, a proverbial mighty oak, which was the state tree of Maryland…until it was reduced to a veritable pile of woodchips by a freakish thunderstorm ... -
Love is Complicated
The first thing that strikes you when listening to Let England Shake, PJ Harvey's latest studio album, out today on Vagrant Records, is that she's not referring to shake, as in rattle and roll. Headier subject matter is at hand here: national ... -
Off the Grid (And Off the Chain)
Fairly uncommon in the U.S., rolling blackouts are intentionally caused electrical power outages engineered by electrical utility companies to save energy, thereby avoiding larger, unscheduled blackouts. Also fairly uncommon in the U.S., until today ... -
Say Na, Na, Na
Smith Westerns are a quartet of Windy City lads barely out of high school who shoot squarely from the hip on their sophomore album, Dye it Blonde. Currently aged 18 through 20, the tipping point for this precocious band came a couple of years back ...
