These days it’s getting harder and harder to find something to smile about. Grin, the second album of Toronto-based blueVenus offers itself for consideration.  Grin is a tale of hurdles; the overcoming of them, the outright avoidance of them, and the tracks of tears and smiles of the miles in between.
The album starts with the title-track and for a few seconds it sounds like you’re about to head down to O Brother, Where Art Thou? country.  But right before you get to the crossroads, blueVenus hits the breaks on Bourbon …

A strange question occurred to me as Backspacer drew to a close for the first time on my stereo; it was about halfway through what is certainly the band’s most mature song yet, the cinematic and winsome “The End,” a song both about death and the presence of life: what would Kurt Cobain be doing right now, at this very minute?
It isn’t stealing Eddie’s moment. And it isn’t a question that has occurred to me during any other Pearl Jam song to this point. Maybe it was the subject matter …

Joshua Bartholomew has no problem going where his heart leads him; this is clear on the digital EP that follows up his sprawling double-disc release, And So It Begins. it’s called Heart Headed, and it’s four unabashedly saccharine love songs performed with nary a twinkle of melancholy.
Heart Headed— in its title, brevity, and instant sincerity— strikes me as rather brave. Maybe it’s the concept of a love song in general that seems brave; the idea of being unafraid of vulnerability, of trusting the simple emotions we’ve learned to drown out; it’s walking naked …

Dredg is hard to dig at. Call them what you may—progressive, alternative, art-rock, weird—and it somehow never fits, like trying to squeeze King Kong into a pair of Abercrombie and Fitch jeans. Their fourth studio album, The Pariah, the Parrot, the Delusion, is heavy, the way things used to be groovy, or bitchin’, or rad. Inspired—at least in part—by Salman Rushdie’s essay, A Letter to the Six Billionth Citizen. The album is like a convention of higher thought; only fun: a new exhibit of paintings; only less pretentious. Rushdie’s essay …

Thrice is one of the best bands going. With their latest release Beggars, the band’s seventh studio album, they further establish themselves as a band who doesn’t allow its sound to grow complacent. Fresh off the experimental The Alchemy Index, Thrice has refocused itself on groove. Recorded in their garage studio, Beggars sounds like an album created in a garage. The songs are organic, as full of energy and enthusiasm as the oil stains and the tent-that-hasn’t-been-used-in-years intimacies of the garage they started out in. After The Artist in the …