All Songs Considered posts about Viking's Choice
by Lars Gotrich
Like Pavement, Speedy Ortiz inverts the notion of rock stardom, while also taking its twisted heft from Polvo, its bummer distortion from Dinosaur Jr. and its gleefully noisy pop sensibility from The Breeders. Hear the oddly hummable "Tiger Tank" from the band's debut album, Major Arcana.
by Lars Gotrich
Unlike Glenn Jones, who builds around melodies, acoustic guitarist Chuck Johnson builds his work around patterns that ripple and rattle like the guitar strings themselves. Sink in, and "On a Slow Passing in Ghost Town" becomes a haunting prayer that unravels before your ears.
by Lars Gotrich
The guitars on the metal band's aching second album chime like classic U2. Hear the nine-minute opener from Sunbather now.
©2013 NPR
by Lars Gotrich
The skin-crawling, multi-sensory set from the experimental U.K. metal band gets the horror film treatment on Maryland Deathfest: The Movie III.
by Lars Gotrich
The doom-metal band's "Valley of the Dolls" sounds as if the Fab Four finally took a trip too far.
by Lars Gotrich
The uncategorizably heavy duo endures an unnerving broken-bottle ritual for "Absurdities & Echoes."
by Lars Gotrich
For this video, Jones performs "Bergen County Farewell" in singer-songwriter Meg Baird's living room in Allentown, N.J. It's the same place he recorded his fifth solo album, My Garden State.
by Lars Gotrich
With clustered chords out of Deathspell Omega, industrial heft via Godflesh, and some gritty Fennesz-like electronics, Teethed Glory and Injury is the kind of anything-goes metal record that will likely prove divisive. "Scald Scar of Water" encompasses a little bit of all of the above.
by Lars Gotrich
On "Stigmatized," the German thrash metal band still has plenty of thundering riffs to deploy.
by Lars Gotrich
Members of Agalloch, YOB, and Hammers of Misfortune form this raw and adventurous metal band. But VHÖL's self-titled debut is a thunderous album that doesn't sound like the sum of its parts.
by Lars Gotrich
The Brooklyn-via-Boston composer and multi-instrumentalist is used to making a huge racket, but here she finds melancholy in still simplicity.
by Lars Gotrich
"Crucial Velocity" will move the earth beneath your feet if you aren't already moving them yourself.
by Lars Gotrich
"Spring fra Livet" offers shimmering poptimism in the face of commercially unpopular heavy music.
by Lars Gotrich
After 10 years of gleefully dismantling genres and challenging audiences to submit to its avant-prog-jazz-drone-noise-whatever hypnosis, the New York City band Zs returns with "Grain Part Two" and its kaleidoscopic video.
by Lars Gotrich
Built on a lumbering riff, Inter Arma subdivides "The Survival Fires" with rolling blast-beats.
