If you ever wondered what Modest Mouse’s first album would sound like if Isaac Brock had gotten into emo instead of psychedelic drugs as a teenager, imadethismistake might be for you: their basic sound is Pacific Northwest sadcore, with plenty of cello in the mix, but Kylewilliam Campol’s distinctive lead vocals push the band out of Influence Bay and into the Ocean of Originality. Sometimes he sounds like he’s delivering slam poetry at an open mic, shouting long, literate paragraphs while the band creates pocket explosions behind him. Other times imadethismistake sound like America’s answer to Los Campesinos!, but their jumpy rhythms are offset by delicate minor-key melodies rather than infectious indie-pop. Anyways, they’re good. And they’re streaming their delightful new record Bow and Quiver in its entirety over at punknews.org, totally for free. Might I suggest you listen to it and then purchase a legal copy? I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

But the real news here is for all of our European friends, who can catch the band on their monthlong tour of the area. It starts on Friday, and we have the dates:

JUN 11 – Bridgend, Wales @ Hobos w/ Neil Sutherland & Friends
JUN 12 – London, England @ The Windmill w/ Neil Sutherland & Friends
JUN 13 – Newcastle, England @ Prudhoe Chare w/ Neil Sutherland & Friends
JUN 14 – Edinburgh, Scotland @ Bannermans w/ Neil Sutherland & Friends
JUN 15 – Glasgow, Scotland @ O’Henry’s w/ Neil Sutherland & Friends
JUN 16 – Durham, England @ The Fish Tank w/ Neil Sutherland & Friends
JUN 17 – Bristol, England @ The Croft w/ Neil Sutherland & Friends
JUN 22 – Caen, France @ El Camino w/ Apologies, I Have None!
JUN 23 – Laval, France @ Queen’s Bar w/ Apologies, I Have None!
JUN 24 – Dijon, France @ Deep Inside w/ Apologies, I Have None!
JUN 25 – Geneva, Switzerland @ Tiki’s Bar w/ Apologies, I Have None!
JUN 26 – Davos, Switzerland @ The Box w/ Apologies, I Have None!
JUN 27 – Gland, Switzerland @ Route de Nyon w/ Apologies, I Have None!
JUN 28 – Ljubljana, Slovenia @ Tovarna Rog w/ Apologies, I Have None!
JUN 29 – Graz, Austria @ At Sub w/ Apologies, I Have None!
JUN 30 – Austria @ TBA
JUL 01 – Oberwart, Austria @ The Oho w/ Apologies, I Have None!
JUL 02 – Wiener Neustadt, Austria @ Bandhaus w/ Apologies, I Have None!
JUL 03 – Germany @ TBA
JUL 04 – Kiel, Germany @ Hansa48 w/ Apologies, I Have None!
JUL 05 – Amsterdam, Netherlands @ TBA w/ Apologies, I Have None!
JUL 06 – Belgium @ TBA
JUL 07 – France @ TBA
JUL 08 – Paris, France @ Le Pix w/ Apologies, I Have None!

imadethismistake:

• Stream Bow and Quiver
• MySpace
• Official Site
• Last.fm

Welcome back to the Load, where we cast our eye towards the latest and greatest in independent rock ‘n’ roll. Now available in capsule form:

I Call Fives -- Bad Advice

The mildly-addictive pop-punk on I Call Fives’ new digital EP Bad Advice is kind of like Dairy Queen’s soft-serve ice cream -- it’s sweet, but not decadent, and delivers exactly the right amount of gratifcation without spilling into overindulgence. If you like The Wonder Years or Set Your Goals, this’ll be right up your alley, and even moreso if you regularly update your tumblr with particularly trenchant lyrics from your favorite bands. This is mall punk at its shiniest and most compressed; if you welded a bunch of power chords together, melted them down into a silver bullet, and shot it into your ear, that’s kind of what I Call Fives is like. (This presupposes that you have technology that can transform sound waves into metal; simile does not apply for all listeners.) They have some cool tricks, too -- the way they layer a few voices together into an overlapping round on “Two Days Or A Lifetime Of Failure” is a nice substitution for the typical double-kick throat-buster breakdown that most bands would’ve gone with. I’d object to the set-closing ballad “Take The Fall” simply on the grounds of unearned wussiness, but it breaks into warp speed at the end for a nice little cherry on this low-cal sundae. I Call Fives basically sound like any other pop-punk band, and they need to find their own twist on the genre before they can create something truly compelling, but I could still listen to this stuff all day. It’s the pleasure principle, man.

MySpace |  Last.fm |  Facebook

The Viaducts -- EP

I recently caught the Viaducts live at darkroom, and their unique take on classic power-pop compelled me to drop $3 on this self-released EP. The ‘Ducts, as I call ‘em, have a true independent spirit -- this is music that acts like other music doesn’t even exist. Their big hit (judging from the drunk dude who kept yelling for it at the show I attended) is “Drive-Thru Girl,” which is pretty much the same thing as Bruce Springsteen’s idiotic “Queen Of The Supermarket,” if you stripped off the studio gloss and slowed it down (and somehow made it more idiotic). I prefer “Tell Me Sister,” which is, I think, a pretty sincere request of the singer’s sister, imploring her to tell him why she’s so sad. Speaking of the singer, his name is Jimmy Rane and the EP’s credits make sure to let you know that he wrote all of the songs included here, so he obviously takes himself pretty seriously as a songwriter. He shouldn’t -- this is about as basic and bare-bones as you can get, especially since the guitar is mixed so low that you can only hear it during the solos - but I find it pretty cool that he does anyway. When I was twelve I received the Dumb and Dumber soundtrack as part of a wildly off-kilter trade with Cory Tendering, and my first thought upon hearing the Viaducts was “These guys should’ve been on the Dumb and Dumber soundtrack.” You can take that however you want to; the Viaducts are gonna take their schtick straight to the bank. Could this be a contender for album of the year? No. But it’s the most fun I’ve had for $3 since I bought a handjob from Robert Downey Jr in 2002.

Official Site |  MySpace |  Facebook

Balance and Composure / Tigers Jaw -- Split

Balance and Composure is an odd name for a band so totally committed to losing their shit at such regular intervals. The first four songs of this split are theirs, and, were I in charge of such things,  I might’ve flipped that around -- Tigers Jaw (hailing, I kid you not, from Scranton, PA) are more tuneful and reserved, with better potentional for easing casual listeners into the balls-out maelstrom that B&C set loose. Balance and Composure (also from Pennsylvania, although not anywhere funny) do the real tight-wire stuff here -- their songs are long, complex, and hard, with plenty of pummeling riffs and explosive tempo changes. The band is great at the sharp, angular stuff that gets all the math nerds fondling their calculators, but they don’t neglect the sensitive, thoughtful side of their persona -- they’re all over the spectrum. Chaos is always exciting, but especially when it’s executed with  this much verve and precision. Tigers Jaw are less exciting but more consistent and listenable; they throw some moody keyboards into the mix, giving their music a softer, more inviting feel. They also kind of sound like Brand New. Overall this split is exactly what you need if you aren’t feeling angsty enough today; listening to this for a few hours got me firmly back into my old awkward teenage headspace, and that’s actually a pretty cool place to visit. I am totally surprised by how much I enjoy this record. Road trip to Pennsylvania, anyone?

Balance and Composure: MySpace |  Last.fm |  Facebook
Tigers Jaw: MySpace |  Last.fm |  Tumblr

How To Destroy Angels -- EP

How To Destroy Angels (or, as I call them, Trent Reznor’s Crystal Castles) have shrouded themselves in mystery so far, offering only vague info about the makeup of the group and some pretty weird videos on their Vimeo channel. But now we have this whole EP, full of industrial squelches and blips and bloops, and I must say: this is the best thing Reznor’s had his name on since The Fragile. It further explores his recent ambient-leaning tendencies while also making time for some dance-ready beats. Vocals are supplied by Reznor’s wife, former-West Indian Girl singer Mariqueen Maandig, who has a pleasing if somewhat affectless voice. Her pipes are best put to use by “A Drowning,” which sounds like M83 getting gently roughed up and wouldn’t feel out of place on the Lost Boys 3 soundtrack. Where the disc  falters a little is on the clubbier stuff -- “BBB” and “Fur Lined” are marvels of tech-geek compositional flair and they move with a sleek, streamlined economy that Nine Inch Nails, as tied to total sensory overload as that band/concept was, never quite managed, but Maandig lacks the personality to really push them through the speaker. Hardcore Trent-heads should enjoy “The Space In Between” and “Parasite” for the way they polish up and advance ideas Reznor first started exploring in the late 90s -- the dirty, heavy, impressionistic stuff that’s become his bread-and-butter since shunning the commerical spotlight for the sterile confines of his studio. This EP covers basically all the bases you could ask it to, and ends just before the group’s kinda limited aesthetic can grow tiresome. I’m psyched for the eventual full-length, but I hope they discover some new colors in their palette before then.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWbfgGDl6XE

Official Site |  MySpace |  Vimeo

The Webelos -- Model Citizen

I am, generally, not a huge power-pop guy. Wasn’t always that way; I used to blast Michael Penn’s first record at full volume all day long. But somewhere along the way, I lost my taste for the genre. It all flooded back, though, when I popped in Model Citizen, the debut EP from Chicago’s own The Webelos. Billing themselves as “America’s #1 scout-rock band” and adopting a genially dorky aesthetic (the CD looks like it’s some kind of interactive learning game from 1993), The Webelos definitely stand out -- there’s a refreshing innocence to their music that speaks to the eight-year-old boy inside me. But the hooks are straight-up adult: imagine if Fountains of Wayne copped their moves from Trust-era Elvis Costello and didn’t bother with all the jokes. The surging guitar riff that anchors ”Peace For The Wicked” pretty much steals the show by virtue of its overpowering melodic aggression, but you’ll find plenty to love on the other five tracks. “Oh Miki” is a welcome country excursion, complete with some sweet pedal steel, and “Lucky Roll” captures the essence of ’90s Costello without succumbing to arrangement overkill. Model Citizen is a fine entry in a long and proud pop tradition, and something genuinely interesting from our hometown. Is there a merit badge for fun?

Official Site |  MySpace |  Twitter

Just The Kid are all about “fun.” They titled their debut EP Keep It Fun!. Their songs are exclusively about girls – a little sniping here and there, but  mostly these guys just want to have fun with them. The sound is highly polished and proudly synthetic; think a slightly glossier Metro Station. To a lot of people, that’s considered a damning rather than a benediction. But as I listened to Keep It Fun! over the course of a few weeks, throwing it on when I needed a quick blast of extremely refined sucrose, it more than served its purpose. This is a certain kind of thing that’s not exactly my certain thing, but it’s an extremely accomplished and smart version of that thing. So kudos to these guys for keeping it fun for all of us instead of just their target demographic of socially awkward teenage girls.

The EP begins with a fairly generic synth intro; it kind of sounds like these guys are bringing the fun from outer space. And then “Shawty,” the first proper track, launches into riffs that seem to draw inspiration primarily from JTK’s parents’ collection of Asia and Def Leppard records. It’s a jarring transition – I didn’t expect to taste the familiar arena tang of dry ice on a record about going to the mall and picking out some goofy sneakers. But there’s a few of these little touches scattered about that make Keep It Fun! feel at least nominally like real rock music. “Hot Damn” hangs on a “let’s dance, dance, baby, baby, let’s dance” lyric that’s probably as self-aware as it is inane. I mean, can you honestly argue with this stuff? It’s cotton candy.

I’d say thirteen minutes is the perfect amount of Just The Kid – they’d have to switch it up a little to sustain my interest for an entire full-length. But I’ll throw Keep It Fun! in from time to time, I’m sure, whenever I want to sashay around my apartment with a fruity mixed drink and pretend I’m in a one man off-Broadway show of Sex And The City. If you’re into this kind of stuff (and I’m sure most of you secretly are), then it’s a great example of its genre. Put it on a cocaine playlist with Cobra Starship, Metro Station, and some Infinity On High-era Fall Out Boy and you’ll be having more fun than the entire cast of Gossip Girl on your average Saturday night at 3am. I like it, in my own private way.

Just The Kid:

• MySpace
• PureVolume
• YouTube

There’s a deep, dark secret I’m going to let you in on: us music critics? We’re also music fans. We have our own biases and tastes. And, for me at least, there are some artists that I am incapable of being even-handed about. For me, Butch Walker is that artist. So you may click over to another review (but for the love of God don’t go to another music site! I’m sorry! I’m sorry!). Under a torrential downpour, though, he played a show on Friday night at the Paradise Rock Club in Boston, and I would think even someone completely unfamiliar with his work would have enjoyed it.

Walker opened his set with a three-song solo set featuring him at the piano. It was his most singer-songwriterly moment: all seriousness in the songs, face tightening into an almost cartoonish cringe for every emotion, fans singing audibly along to every word. The opener “Atlanta” sounded stronger in concert than in its studio counterpart, more subdued with less emotional overselling. It’s the benefit of playing songs so much that they become so comfortable after awhile.

Same goes for “Cigarette Lighter Love Song,” the lone song from his days with The Marvelous 3 in the night’s set. It’s a sign of his fanbase’s makeup, then, that Walker doesn’t need to even play his only hit with the Marvelous 3 (“Freak of the Week”) nor his most notable attempt at a solo hit single (“Mixtape”). If the show is for the hardcore, that’s because all he has is hardcore fans. Thanks specifically to them, every song  became an anthem, making the small club concert feel like a major event.

The thing about Walker’s music is that, however little known it is to the world outside his shows and records, he ultimately makes pop music. It’s easy to embrace, eager to please and always pleasant. Even at its darkest, there’s a bright sheen to all of it that makes it easy, and I mean that in the best way. So even at his darkest, there’s something fun about it all, with Walker attempting a Boston accent in between jokes and his band dancing their way throughout the evening. He bounds along the stage with the energy of someone half his age, especially as the show starts coming to a close, and his band keeps up to give the show some visual aspect.

His crack band, too, brings out the best in the material, hitting all the T-Rex-like backing vocals from his latest record, I Liked It Better When You Had No Heart. They have a great onstage chemistry while still being as professional as hired guns. The group showed versatility in switching instruments frequently, and at one point stripping down for a bluegrass approach to the low-key “Don’t You Think Someone Should Take You Home” and trading off vocal duties for his uber-emo anthem “The Best Thing You Never Had.” It kept the show on its toes and made even the stage feel like a communal experience.

But while the songs from the new record came off fairly well, the night made a great case for his previous album, Sycamore Meadows, having Walker’s best songs. Its “Closer to the Truth” is increasingly becoming his “Thunder Road,” a Spingsteen-styled epic escalating from a solo guitar performance into a full-fledged band blowout. The bigger, bolder moments like that provided the most impact as they could stretch out on the self-admitted “Honky Tonk Women”-rip “Ponce De Leon Ave” or the power pop “Maybe It’s Just me.” His songs have a way of being sensitive ditties on record and becoming arena rock blasts in concert, a side effect of Walker’s past in a hair metal band.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEtGZIWWo9c

Meanwhile, the encores showed the most range after an evening of singer-songwriterly goodness, including a notably non-ironic (but still fun) cover of Hall & Oates’ “Rich Girl,” the faux-doo wop “They Don’t Know We Know” and his Dylan-styled wordy  “When Canyons Ruled the World.” The latter maximized Walker’s gift for singalong hooks, ending the show with him roaming through the crowd and up to the balconies, leading an a capella reprise of its chorus while he orchestrated a slow fade-out. It takes a pro with a devoted fans to get an audience to respond so seamlessly to a request to slowly get quiet. The rest of the show built up the goodwill to allow it to happen. I’ve seen Waller wilder, but his current show is a great veteran act, showing his comfort and the presence earned from long tours over an enormous, amorphous career, but wrapped in a freshness that can only come from freedom from expectations.

The show opened with singer Will Dailey and his band The Rivals. They presented a polished Tom Petty-ish brand of classicist rock, which, come to think of it, is what the Wallflowers did. Dailey and crew are a bit more high energy than that band, but I almost feel like they might be the kind that loses most of its power without the enormity of a concert setting. Maybe I’m wrong; they impressed me enough to check him out later. They made for a great appetizer, at least.

The best summation of a Butch Walker show, I think, came from the fans waiting out in the rain before the show started. They included a man in his (I’d guess) mid-40s with a few younger people, including his daughter and her boyfriend. The older guy was as enthusiastic in the crowd of mostly people in their 20s (but he was not alone for his age group), singing along to all the words loudly. After Daily’s set, his daughter was telling her boyfriend how great Walker’s shows are. About three songs after the full band took the stage, I looked over to see him, mouth agape and smiling. On the way out from the show, there were two even older ladies there who sounded like they had enjoyed it. And that’s the best thing about pop music: you never know who’ll buy into the melody.

Butch Walker:

• Official Site
• MySpace
• LastFM
• Twitter

You’d be forgiven for assuming that the dudes in Motion City Soundtrack are a bunch of pussies. Justin Pierre, the frontman, has a sweet, high-pitched voice, and his wacky over-moussed hair suggests an alternate universe Nikki Sixx, post-overdose. The rest of the dudes in the band sort of look like they really enjoy Magic: The Gathering. Two of their records (including this one) have been produced by Blink-182′s Mark Hoppus, who is actually a cool dude but loses cred by palling around with king-of-the-douches Tom DeLonge. So, if you possesed only these facts, and maybe had heard a few snippets of the band’s music here and there, you probably wouldn’t be overly impressed or consider them the kind of “serious” music that you pretend to like when you’re talking to girls at hipster bars. But, damnit, Motion City Soundtrack are amazing, and My Dinosaur Life is their best record yet – a fast and thick collection of scathingly honest rock songs executed perfectly by guys that are total experts. It announces, in no uncertain terms, that these planeswalkers are done taking shit.

The most explicit example of this (literally) is the track “@!#?@!,” in which Pierre warns, “You all need to go away, you motherfuckers / You all need to leave me and my homeboys alone.” Shit is real, dawg. But in case you’re not convinced, listen to the other 11 songs, none of which gets nearly as mushy as every song on their last record (Even If It Kills Me), and at least half of which feature heavier riffs and faster tempos than anything in the MCS catalog. “Disappear” and “The Weakends” are both stand-out rockers that get deep (although the latter loses points for its Fall Out Boy-seque), and “Pulp Fiction” and “Skin & Bones” showcase Pierre’s oddball humor and instinctive melodic gifts. Dude is really killing it on this record, BTW – he’s developed a new, super-croony delivery style that elevates an otherwise boilerplate (for these guys) track like first single “Her Words Destroyed My Planet” from MCS-by-numbers to total-boner-extravaganza.

My Dinosaur Life is a coming-out party for a band that has refined its formula, charted out strengths and weaknesses, and made a really great record that plays by its own rules and includes a good number of surprises even for longtime fans. Lyrically, Pierre is in fine form; he sounds nowhere near as defeated as he did on Even If It Kills Me – this dude is ready to rumble, packing hundred of words into dense narratives and then letting them cascade out in that beautiful voice, never losing control for a second. He’d actually make an excellent rapper, probably. The band kicks up dust behind him, relying less on big keyboard hooks than on hard-charging guitar riffs, and this makes a big difference – Motion City Soundtrack finally sound like He-Men. This is the kind of record that Alkaline Trio made with Good Mourning, that Fall Out Boy made with Infinity On High: these boys have grown up, and My Dinosaur Life is as thematically deep as the hooks are wide. I hope it’s a hit (and that MCS’s new tenure on a major label goes better than most of their emo peers’) – Motion City Soundtrack deserve to be huge, and this is the record that should do it.

Fall Out Boy’s recently released singles collection Believers Never Die is a great example of the greatest hits paradox – by including all of a group’s best known songs, you inevitably leave off deep cuts that better exmplify the given band’s greatness. So, while Believers Never Die includes official singles like “Dance, Dance” and “This Ain’t A Scene (It’s An Arms Race),” it inadvertently supports the notion that FOB is a shallow band for teenagers. As hardcore, unapolegtic Fall Out Boy fans, we at the Assault offices have compiled a list of supplemental tracks to help complete the picture. To wit:

“Chicago Is So Two Years Ago”

“The Patron Saint Of Liars And Fakes”

“7 Minutes In Heaven (Atavan Halen)”

“Our Lawyer Made Us Change the Name of This Song So We Wouldn’t Get Sued”

“The Carpal Tunnel Of Love”

“Hum Hallelujah”

“I’ve Got All This Ringing In My Ears And None On My Fingers”

“Headfirst Slide Into Cooperstown On A Bad Bet”

“w.a.m.s.”

“Pavlove”

Chris Carrabba, returning as Dashboard Confessional after the relative flop of 2007′s The Shade Of Poison Trees, faces an uphill battle: the painfully earnest sincerity of his best work  no longer has cachet in a pop culture landscape where the shit-eating grin of fake self-parody is hot currency, his once loyal fanbase has grown up and (hopefully) moved on to subtler and smarter art, and the inexorable march of time has made his fixation on prom night themes undeniably comical. After contemplating these factors, he has elected not to throw in the towel but, instead, to release an album featuring forty-two minutes of material with the songcraft level (if not the maturity) of your average Taylor Swift single.

Alter The Ending is truly a wonder to behold. As in, how did this record ever get made? Who paid for the studio time? Did Carrabba actually believe these songs were worthy of being immortalized on a tiny plastic disc? I don’t mean to doubt his intentions, and he does have a history of being not terribly self-aware, but this is really pushing it. The deluxe version of the record comes with a bonus acoustic edition of the album; I recommend you spring for that, if you’re really interested, because the full studio version has been mixed to sound like a long lost Rick Springfield record.

The disc actually starts promisingly with “Get Me Right” – the central riff is sharp and Carrabba does interesting things with his voice, twisting around on the hook and really selling it. But once that’s over, Alter The Ending devolves into the aural equivalent of a Full House episode. Where Carrabba once captivated with well-observed details and the sheer perversity of his obsessive streak, he now deals in bland generalities. I don’t want to say that the guy is being dishonest or calculating in his efforts to chronicle standard teen heartbreak in the most generic way possible, but I will say that this joke is way, way better on the new Weezer album.

There are some bright spots: the title track provides genuine uplift with its showroom riffs and surging chorus, and album-ender “Hell On The Throat” is refreshingly underdone (although I could do without the big, ponderous piano notes). But mostly it’s crap like “Everybody Learns From Disaster,” where the disaster in question appears to be some harsh sunburn (seriously) and the central lesson is so head-poundingly “Duh!” that Carrabba’s every utterance of it becomes insulting. Is this supposed to be music for grown-ups, or what?

As somebody that has enjoyed Dashboard Confessional in the past, I hoped that I might continue to for some time in the future. But I can’t endorse Alter The Ending any more that I can tolerate listening to it one more time; this is the worst kind of pandering treacle. There is absolutely no reason for Chris Carrabba to continue in this vein, as he’s lost the ability to provide memorable tunes and, more importantly, genuine insight. Maybe a few people will enjoy this, but I really doubt it.