What makes Identity Crisis more than an academic exercise is Benson’s skill as a composer and producer. The production on “Bite Your Lip” and “Til You Got It” verges on EDM-tinged pop, but it has enough harmonic variety to not feel as synthetic and fake as EDM can. […]
Crystal City’s first two albums — ‘Change’ (2014) and ‘Bartenderly’ (2017) — drew from Paul Westerberg’s playbook. They shared his penchant for ramshackle punk and glistening, soaring pop — the electric and acoustic, the sad and hopeful. […]
Months after its initial release, I still feel my ear pleading for another listen of Elizabeth Moen’s third album, A Million Miles Away. While Moen has always possessed a certain sage sound, her junior album ups the stakes […]
Iowa City’s own The Only Ion recently gave us his newest EP, Roses, in May 2018. It’s such a diverse and articulate album it’s really hard to label […]
Back in 2012, an Iowa City-based string band named themselves Flash in a Pan in the belief that they would play two shows and dissolve quietly into the night. Those two shows were seven years ago now, and 2018 saw the band release their second full-length album in as many years. […]
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. […]
Return of the Skeleton by Surf Zombies Five albums in with Return of the Skeleton, and Cedar Rapids’ Surf Zombies are as fresh and fired up as ever. A rotating cast of some of the CR music scene’s heaviest hitters, the Surf Zombies have at their core guitarist Brook Hoover (full disclosure: Hoover, an in-demand […]
Listening to the debut album from Cedar Falls band Hex Girls, I’m reminded of the time before punk broke in the ’70s. Bands like the Dead Boys and Johnny Thunders’ band the Heartbreakers took ’60s garage rock and psychedelia mixed in attitude and energy (and speed and alcohol) and spilled it on the dirty stages […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
Des Moines band Brother Trucker is an honest-to-goodness Iowa institution. Since 2000, the band has toured extensively, bringing their roots rock and country to avid fans in bars throughout the Midwest. Their Iowa pedigree was established when they signed on as one of the original bands on Dave Zollo’s seminal Trailer Records, where they released […]
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