indie

Slumber Party   The self-titled debut from Omaha, Neb., indie-rock band Baby Walrus is an irritating mix of 17 songs largely filled with clicking shakers, jingles, noisemakers or whatever other uninteresting instruments the overrated trio gathered from the supermarket infant aisle.   Luckily, the most annoying songs on “Baby Walrus,” like “Some Dawns No Bird […]

  Merge Indie rock’s Spoon sounds like most too-cool scenester bands rising out of Austin, Texas, these days, but it’s fair to assume that most of those bands are trying to sound like Spoon did in the late Nineties.   Spoon’s new album, “GaGaGaGa Ga,” combines amateur basement studio charm with a hip veneer of […]

Merge It’s a little disappointing to get what may be the best record of 2007 so early in the year. It sets a dangerous precedent unlikely to be matched. The group’s second full-length release, “Neon Bible,” sounds like its 2004 debut: huge and orchestral, with strings, drones and organs weaving in and out. The album […]

Capitol There’s always an underlying current of anxiety when a beloved indie band makes the leap to the majors, particularly one with as precious and precise an aesthetic as practiced by The Decemberists. Rambling, fey epics about forbidden love in the 18th century, Colin Meloy’s bracingly literate pop songs are an anomaly on the modern […]

RCA/ATO From the earliest days, shaggy, psychedelic-tinged indie rockers My Morning Jacket have been a band most comfortable in the live-wire environs of concert halls and theaters’ sprawling, dense and often stunningly powerful, front man Jim James and his Kentucky cohorts have staked a claim as one of the best live rock bands currently working […]

Fat Possum Records I never thought I’d give a favorable review to an album with a little girl and pretty dragonflies on the cover, but I am. The Ohio-based Heartless Bastards shocked and awed last year with their debut, “Stairs and Elevators,” one of the best albums of 2005.   Lead singer and guitarist Erika […]