Songs on Pinkerton, Ranked
In honor of a 20-year-old record’s newfound Platinum status.
Songs ranked worst to first.
This was not fun.
10) Butterfly
9) Across the Sea – The chorus remains catchy as hell, but the content has not aged well into our new #problematic reality.
8) Getchoo
7 & 6) Falling For You / Why Bother? – Pour one out for both of these songs, which make up the raucous, slappy, rock-and-roll bookend of what is an otherwise emotionally exhausting record. If there is a party to be had, it is with these two cuts.
5) No Other One – People forget how good this song is.
4) Tired of Sex
3) Pink Triangle
2) The Good Life
1) El Scorcho – Possibly the best Weezer song.
Philadelphia has no shortage of screaming, flexible, third-wave emo bands. Few arrive at that designation through more varied routes than Tiny Rainbows. 
If 
As a four-piece, the band cranked out some of the most gleeful drunk-punk Philadelphia has ever seen. Its 2011 self-titled record, a collection of it previous EPs, still sounds electric today. If one wanted to get historic and sentimental about it, the songs bridged the gap between the city’s harmonic punk roots and a new class of Lawrence Arms / Dillinger Four Midwest apostles. Even today, it’s a hooky, blazing collection of songs that suggest a very fun, probably dangerous party is happening somewhere not too far away, if you’re ballsy enough to go join it.
We packed our shit and headed to Atlas Studios in March of 2012.
After this, the band didn’t exactly collapse, but it did recede into itself a little bit. Much was made by the band about its decision to go fully DIY on 2014’s excellent Comfort in the Discord. The Holy Mess appeared, at least from the outside, as a group distrustful of new people, of individuals who might be perceived to benefit or recontextualize their work. They were a band that seemed, above all else, determined to operate on its own terms, at its own pace. Comfort in the Discord is a great record; it feels grown up, both fearful and reverent of its own past, more clear-eyed and a little less reckless, no less energetic.
Let me be frank about a few things.
The second thing: I was not wearing my helmet at the time of the accident.
In the long history of people being hit by cars while riding bikes, this accident is a minor one, both in terms of property and personal damage. The bike is fine; my wife and I took it to the bike shop the next day and they fixed the (largely cosmetic) damage within 10 minutes, at no charge to me (there is no camaraderie quite like bike professionals and people hit by cars while riding bikes).
“It’s taken us a long time to release anything new,” he says. “We recorded an EP (in 2014-15) that ended up not being something we wanted to release, quality-wise. It didn’t represent us or our sound at all, so it was scrapped.”
The hooks on “Paycheck” and “Roo” are informed by years spent playing live shows and understanding that earworms motivate audiences. Even “Paycheck,” which might be least hopeful song on the record, is wrapped in a power-pop bounce that sneaks bad times in on a Trojan Horse of catchy, bouncy guitars. The way Francisco tells it, this is by design.
Sexy Teenagers released 
DC post-punks 
It’s tempting to hang 
Ultimate Golf’s ep is certainly a rough-around-the-edges affair; these songs sound like they were recorded in secret, like they band is trying not to wake up their parents upstairs. Look past the shagginess though; here is a four-song collection that boats real potential. The band mixes elements of country rock and 90s indie guitar with an even, downbeat vocal style and plain-stated lyrics that evoke universal themes of loneliness and longing. Songs like “fuck, broken cig” and “fix your spare tire!” flirt with early Modest Mouse, hitting a level of unpredictability that doesn’t come around often.
Praising a singer-songwriter for lyrical brevity is usually about as back-handed as a compliment can get. On Jon Kohen’s 2016 EP, Curse the Darkness, or Create a Light, however, an economy of words is part of the record’s overall appeal.
Hopeless Otis has always been about positivity in the face of life’s myriad disappointments. That outlook has lead the band to a more focused and creatively fertile place. Dangerfield, the trio’s new album – it’s first full-length in nearly five years – is an improvement on almost every level the group operates on. Musically, lyrically, structurally and thematically, Hopeless Otis have grown into sounding like they band they always hinted they could be; no longer a Latterman-lite, this album finds the group more muscular, more willing to experiment, and all-around tighter.
There’s a new Snails record out. It’s call Songs from the Shoebox. It is a good record. Get down on the good times.
In exploring Motorhead this year, I found that Lemmy insisted on classifying his band as “rock n’ roll” above all else; not metal, not punk, just rock n’ roll. I imagine that The St. Pierre Snake Invasion would say the same about its 2015 album, A Hundred Years a Day. The record carries a lot of signifiers that align it to things like metal, punk, hard rock and indie, but none of those classifications really fit on the whole.
While 2015’s Wavves collaboration, No Life For Me, was an interesting experiment, it didn’t fully scratch my Cloud Nothing’s itch. In the nearly two years since the band’s last album, Here and Nowhere Else, there’s been no lack of energetic, hook-laden garage rock, but nothing that’s quite had the same lack of attention or inward-looking sulk to make those jams seem effortless.
It’s a little hard to pin down West Chester emo-outfit Tiem based on its Outmatched EP. The band itself says that the songs are a collection written over the course of two-and-a-half years, and that’s a long time to change and develop your sound. Will it eventually sound like an alt-rock throwback, like “Friendly has a Grey Area,” or will the folk-y acoustic of “Jim” be the ultimate path? Too early to buy stock either way.
Maybe there is some larger external stimuli that I am unaware of, or maybe it is just because a generation of people who were raised in the shadow of the new internet in the 80s and 90s are just now hitting their personal Age of Irony, but Space Jam has made a cultural comeback. I see 
“Indie Rock” has long been a disjointed genre, less a true signifier and more a loose collection of ideals; nothing more than a carnival tent to house an endless squad of sub-genres. The onset of the internet and (I’d argue) the continuing search for identity in the aughts has brought this fragmentation to the extreme. It is no revelation to say that calling something “Indie Rock” in 2015 is to not accurately describe it at all. An indie rock band can sound like 
You don’t have to look far to find bands doing Kinsella-endebted twinkly guitar rock, but you’d have to look very hard indeed to find done the way Philadelphia’s Jank is. On its 2014 debut album, Awkward Pop Songs, the band takes that style and, rather than using it as a backdrop for confessional songwriting, layer it with irony, internal references and homages to weed culture. It makes for a compelling bait-and-switch and is refreshing to hear a band’s sound work in opposition to its lyrics.
The name most often applied to the music of Andrew Falkous, be it in Mclusky, Future of the Left or his most recent semi-solo project Christian Fitness, is noise rock. For my money, the images and suggestions that “noise rock” invoke are not a fitting description but, when squinting, the tag makes some kind of sense.
The easiest thing to compare Philadelphia’s
Mike Pace has always made music with one foot in the past. His first band, Oxford Collapse, made beautiful rock music for sensitive men acting like brash children; it was music for the 23-year-old at the college party, old enough to know better but still young enough to not care.
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