Cancer Bats
Hail Destroyer
Metalblade Records
10/10
Fan-fucking-tastic, I love this album. It’s as hip as it is brutal, metal with a very prominent punk-rock feel. That’s all you need to know.
-Kim Worpek

Holy crap! Look at this hi-tech feat! Racket’s Gail Navarro interviews Keaton Simons in the hallway of the House of Blues.
PART 1

PART 2

-Interview by Gail Navarro.

Thursday
Common Existence
Epitaph
7/10

A delight for those suffering from post-hardcore blues, Common Existence delivers a monitored dosage of well-paced lyrics and strategically placed screams. The tracks, although entertaining, bled together, not allowing me any time to digest what I had just heard. The album resembles a run-on sentence, and pulls its own weight, with heavy sounds that come barreling through from time to time.
However, I award key props to the Jersey boys for staying on track, by not overwhelming us with progressive tech standards and electronic inducers. I must admit …

P.O.S.
Never Better
Rhymesayers
10/10

With artwork that puts Tool to shame, P.O.S. busts out his latest solo departure from Doomtree with a fury. There’s hidden beauty in otherwise chaotic basslines as P.O.S. deftly slides his perfectly chosen words in-between the beats and samples. Where his work with Doomtree was straightforward and he shared time and space with other gifted gabbers, Never Better grabs you by the ears and doesn’t let go until the record stops spinning. Having toured with Atmosphere and playing last years indie-hip hop Paid Dues Festival, P.O.S. is now …

You might say that Ian Spiegelman is a funny man with a funny name. The novelist and former Gawker editor has made a career lampooning politicians, bankers, and anyone else with a target on their back. Now Spiegelman sits down with me to talk about something more personal- himself. And as I found out, he keeps it weird regardless of whether he’s talking about his own origins or the origins of the rich and famous.
Racket Jack: What does your name mean to you?
Ian Spiegelman: My whole identity …

Richie James Follin
Battle
Self-Released
8/10
Few artists have the honor of being able to say the put an album together themselves. Maybe they produced the record, but someone had to distribute the music to all their adoring fans out there. That usually means signing with a label- any label. Not Richie James Follin. Not only did he record the music for his self-produced album Battle, but he also went through the trouble of putting up a website and passing the word via blogs and peer to peer. For a self-made guy, his music …

Phil Doucet is no slouch. The Katy Mae lead singer, guitarist and native New Yorker has spent the last several years plowing the musical fields, harvesting a distinctive sound that has earned the band critical acclaim- not to mention attention from the money men of the record industry. Now, as the band comes into its own, Doucet catches up with me for a interview on life, music, and the future of rock n’ roll.
In this second half of a two part interview, Doucet lets loose on MTV, “the industry”, …

Van Morrison
Astral Weeks Live at the Hollywood Bowl
Listen To The Lion Records
8/10
I have never seen Van Morrison live, but my roommate gave me this warning going into listening to the Astral Weeks Live album:
“Oh, you know that thing bands do where they just play all together forever?”
“Do you mean jam bands?”
“Yea, he does that with his voice. It’s weird.”
Boy was he correct. Morrison’s voice slices straight through you… and then kind of sits there sticking it to you over and over with what borders on stuttering. A well recorded …

MC Lars
This Gigantic Robot Kills
Oglio Records
8/10
Accordions, robots, talking shit on hipster girls and Wesley Willis? How could I possibly even attempt to hate on this? Well… I mean, I could try, but I won’t. Laptop-based nerd-rap is something I can stand behind, even if it’s just for a little while. Even with special guests like Nerf Herder’s Parry Gripp, The Aquabat’s MC Bat Commander and “Weird” Al motherfucking Yankovic, the novelty of Ska-starved robot raps can get old. It’s an album that is full of songs perfect for mix-tapes …

Cannibal Corpse
Evisceration Plague
Metalblade Records
10/10
Every bit as awesome and brutal as you would expect from Cannibal Corpse, Evisceration Plague is a beautifully structured, unrelenting absolute power house of pure metal; designed to be played at ear-bleeding decibels and not for the faint of heart. The record comes off as more mature and strongly built than their previous efforts. It grabs you by the juggular from the moment Priests of Sodom opens the cd and you’re bombarded by the thrashing guitar riffs and the beating drums, the throaty scream of Fisher’s …

The Drones
Havilah
ATP Records
7/10
Oscillating between weak melodic shoe gaze and their best attempts at being Modest Mouse, The Drones leave me confused, anxious and sleepy. I am generally down for what most would lump haphazardly into the “emo” category (which I lovingly call cry-baby music), but even my unabashed love for lengthy musical tangents can’t be expected to tolerate some of the minimalistic guitar-riffs on tracks like “Cold and Sober” and “The Drifting Housewife” and the Isaac Brock impressions on “The Minotaur” or “Oh My.”
With songs averaging over five minutes long …

The Shaking Hands
The Shaking Hands
Kiss of Death Records
10/10
Shaking Hands id exactly what I wanted to listen to today. I couldn’t find my Rancid CD and needed some music to scream along to, pumping my fists in the air as if I was no longer the apathetic asshat I’ve become, but the fireball of youthful aggression that I once was. Pissing on politics and flipping the bird to the proverbial corporate douchebags that are the antithesis of punk, Shaking Hands unleashes aural hell. Somehow avoiding the same sound that their hometown …

Two Tongues
Two Tongues
Vagrant Records
6/10
Here’s how I imagine Two Tongues starting:
Max Bemis (of Say Anything): God, who can I partner with to highlight how manly my voice is?
Chris Conley of Saves The Day: Oh! Oh! Me! Pick Me! With my feminine voice and your masculine one, we’ll be the non-incestual Donny and Marie of Indie Rock!
Ol’ Beamer: AWESOME!
And so Two Tongues was born. Beamie says that it’s supposed to be platonic, but I highly doubt it. Example from “If I Could Make You Do Things:”
Beamie: Please don’t turn away
CeCe: I don’t …

House of Heavy
House of Heavy
Metalblade Records
2/10
Complete and utter crap. Nickelback on speed. Douchebag radio rock. Horrible vocal/lyrical structure over music that to me is not at all up to par with much of Metalblade’s usual releases, nor did I feel the vocal presence at all fit with the music in itself. Deceptively not-heavy for a band who likes to call themselves ‘House of Heavy’, I feel like the cd/overall sound came off as sort of…cheesy, and manufactured. I gave this a 2/10 because it did succeed in droning into …

Brokencyde
BC13
Suburban Noize Records
2/10
Screamo-Crunk hyphy? Wigga, please.

- Jonathan Yost

Crooked X
Crooked X
Capitol Records
9/10
At fourteen years old, I hadn’t been to a concert, I thought White Zombie was the epitome of badass, and I had never seen a live tit, let alone touched one. At fourteen years of age, Crooked X has toured with KISS, Ted Nugent and, one can safely assume, seen more tits in a night than I have in my 27 years. With a voice that sounds like it could scare Nick Nolte’s beard off, young Forrest has apparently made puberty his bitch. And then you have …