Blaze McKenzie loves his toys. His solo project puts vocals through the meat grinder, and his production work with Sydney Wayser finds the artist surrounded in sharply resonating chimes.
But for his own group, Blaze dials the textures back. He describes The Can’t Tells as ‘the only Non-Noise band in Brooklyn.’ But one could reasonably disagree. On their self-titled debut, the song ‘You’re Not Listening’ taunts the listener with the lyrics: ‘You’re not listening, cuz I’m not saying it right’ for the last half of the tune, sandwiched between layers of feedback that build to frenzy, whether he’s saying ‘it’ right or not.
Similarly, listen to the desperate lover portrayed in ‘Whipping Boy’ fall down a well of jagged guitar sounds, never quite reaching the bottom before the song abruptly ends, and you’ll start to get the picture… this is some well-thought out stuff, noise and all. A lo-fi tinkerer cut from the fabric of Atlas Sound, Blaze never reaches the bottom of his toolbox; placing mellotron, chimes and violins on the same team. But while he’s tinkering away in the background, he’s waxing poetic in the foreground. Blaze possesses an unassuming voice made to deal with a lot of these moving parts, always placing texture in service of testimonial.
There’s a lot going on here, and the way the three-piece is able to bring it all to bear in this cohesive and well-rounded effort, makes me more than happy to play in their sandbox a little while. See them play Piano’s Nov 22nd with Fete and Ego Puppets. – Mike Levine (@goldnuggets)

We stumbled upon this NYC band called "Ego Puppets" while working on the next blog entry about The Can’t Tells (with whom they’ll share the Pianos’ stage on 11.22) and really liked this "Vibration" song. Checkerout!

Admittedly, I sometime search for coverage of emerging local bands I like on other (more) established music sites like Brooklynvegan, Stereogum and Pitchfork. When I do this, I secretly hope I won’t find any, so that one day I’ll be able to proudly say: "we were the first ones to cover these guys!"
Ah, the vanity of pride…
Today I decided to do the same with Pearl & The Beard, a band that’s not very new, but that has been – without any doubts – one of the most interesting, entertaining and followed NYC based alt-folk acts for at least 2 or 3 years now. To my surprise, neither Pitchfork nor Stereogum ever published anything whatsoever about them, which in my book is almost a scandal. This not only makes us proud of the coverage we’ve been giving to them, but is also very telling about how quality is not always rewarded in the online publications perceived as the "truth holders" of indie music. Luckily there’s NPR, who premiered the band’s beautiful new video, check it out here.