With only four tracks, clocking in at 26:44, it’s likely that Skin of Earth’s ‘Burn Barrel’ — released at the tail end of 2018 as an omen, a prediction, a benediction for the year to come — should rightly be called an EP. But damn, it doesn’t feel like one. […]
Album Reviews
Album Review: 86plot — ‘Identity Crisis’
Album Review: Crystal City — ‘Three-Dimensionality’
Album Review: Elizabeth Moen — ‘A Million Miles Away’
Album Review: The Only Ion — ‘Roses’
Album Review: Flash in a Pan — ‘Folklore’
Album Review: Dryad — ‘The Silurian Age’

The metal scene in Iowa City has always been a pocket universe where the boundary between fans and musicians is permeable. It’s like the bar in Cheers — where everybody knows your name — but with more long hair, tattoos and black leather. The competition between bands is to be the loudest, heaviest and tightest, not the most successful. […]
Album Review: Surf Zombies — ‘Return of the Skeleton’
Album Review: Hex Girls — ‘More of That’
Album Reviews: The Feralings — The Feralings

Iowa City folkies the Feralings released their highly anticipated debut EP last October, a collection of six gorgeous tracks that’s stylistically scattered but so tightly woven and so cleanly mixed and mastered (I hope we hear a lot more from Ben Schmidt and Rescued Rabbit Studio) that the diversity has the feel of a carefully curated sampler. […]
Album Review: 85 decibel Monks — Sliced Beets

Tack-Fu’s story begins here in Iowa City as a dedicated Hawkeye and fan of music. As hip hop began to get more attention in the late ’90s, Tack discovered his true passion for the boards and later expanded his love for creating music into a production empire. Fu, which Tack takes to mean a practice […]
Album Review: Kate Kane — Meet the Cats

Meet the Cats by Kate Kane I can’t think of a single better combination of words than “cat-themed Kate Kane album from Bloated Kat Records.” Any of those three factors would have me dropping everything else to listen, but the combination is an outstanding pop-punk success filled with whimsical odes that I’m pretty sure retroactively […]