Cymbals, “Sideways, Sometimes” ([?], 2012)Okay dancey/electronic post-punkish rock. The stark angularity is cool, the new-romantic songwriting works sometimes, but the singer does kind of sound like a twerp, though he grows on you.Try 48/23/12
Deborah Harry, “In Love With Love” 12” (Geffen, 1987)Awesome remix of a tune from her ’87 solo album, tricked out here with a dub-spectral arcade of sound and percolating Latin-disco percussion. Captures like nothing else the NYC-at-night passage from a crowded club dancefloor to the empty streets outside, that crackling sense of menace and excitement.Try […]
Deep Time, “Deep Time” (Hardly Art, 2012)A cool one, this features blasé/accented female vocals over mildly dissonant melodic guitar, and keyboard whooshing. The feel is simultaneously domestic and interplanetary, like if Stereolab had been on Woodsist.Try 4, 5, 87/19/12
Denali, “Denali” (Jade Tree, 2002)This band was nearly unique in making the often self-deflatingly introverted emo sounds of its day into something mysterious and immense, gradually surrounding you in gray, glacial waves of guitar with Maura Davis’s resounding voice swooping in. This is their debut, recorded in the immediate wake of 9/11, and it captures […]
Dickies, “The Punk Singles Collection” (Spectrum, 2000; original recordings 1978-80)Early punk had a strain (feeding into hardcore) that was faster, lighter and sillier than the NY and U.K. predecessors, and the Dickies were the fastest, lightest and silliest of all. Helium-crazed chipmunks on a sugar jag, they blaze through their performances so fast, almost to […]
Dictators, “Bloodbrothers” (Asylum, 1979)Third and last LP by the proto-punk NYC legends, the surf/garage/trash stylings of the first and the more Böc/metal flourishes of the second now augmented with a warm, almost Springsteen-ish East-Coast-hometown sensibility.Try 1/ 1, 1/ 56/18/18
Dirty Dishes, “The Most Tarnished Birds” (Stolen Apples, 2012)Another band rediscovering the 70s – in this case a blend of soft/loud dynamic alterations à la Throwing Muses, and grainy mid-range sludge-lite à la a hundred bands I can’t think of right now – and doing a pretty good job of it at that.Try 1,57/12/12
Disco Inferno, “D. I. Go Pop” (Second Wind, 1994)This group were part of the postpunk-turning-into-electronica zeitgeist of early ‘90s Britain, but despite some remaining Joy Divisionisms here, this is ultimately a showcase of some of the craziest, most un-guitar-like sounds ever wrung out of mere guitars, courtesy of gadgetry that was then still wild and […]
Dog Party, “Lost Control” (Asian Man, 2013)Garage-punk in the now-ubiquitous surf/girl-group style, but these two sisters are younger, faster, and snottier. Still, while the blowout stuff is great fun, the more melodic midtempo stuff is just flat-out great, hook-filled and affecting.Try 4, 8, 97/15/14
The Donnas, “Spend the Night” (Atlantic, 2002)This where their trademark Runaways-meets-Kiss bubblepunk/hard-rock swagger thickens into truly wrecking-ball-swinging dimensions. Teen-delinquent putdowns whose snot-nosed wit is just the icing on the perfectly hook-laden cake. But fuck, man, those guitarsTry 1, 3, 57/29/12