Although I grew up fifteen minutes north of the Kentucky border, it’s a safe play to label me  a blue-state Yankee.  I enjoy trendy beverages and own expensive jeans.  In my little neighborhood, I trudge through the salted streets and urban sprawl just long enough to fill my belly and clear my head; I possess [...]

It’s been a flurry of activity at citizendick world headquarters this week.  As a result of our keyboard pounding, we’ve got several big items in the works.  Today, however, the demands of being rock critics and nine-to-fivers have been a bit more taxing than usual.  Just this once, instead of hitting you with the in-depth [...]

Before I dive headfirst into this Golden Boots album, I have a few things that I need to confess.  First of all, I have not been as regular of a contributor as I would like these past few weeks, and for that I apologize.  Normally, the coolest guy involved in the site should be posting [...]

If you’d stumbled into a gold-rush saloon in 1850, covered in dirt, specks of the morning’s oatmeal in your scraggly beard, your prospector’s hat pushed up on your sweaty brow, you would not have been shocked to see The Devil Makes Three cranking out tunes to the hoots and hollers of your toothless brethren.  The [...]

An extremely cool musical package arrived at citizendick’s eastern campus today: the Weepy EP from Seattle rockers Mt. St. Helens Vietnam Band.  I ordered the 4-song EP from the band’s myspace page since the tracks I’d heard caught my fancy and I wanted to be a bit more informed in advance of their soon to [...]

About two hours east of Cincinnati, the antithesis of suburbia blossoms in a little place called Greasy Ridge.  The tired streets wind through nostalgic lanes of sycamore and maple clusters, many careening through wilting cemeteries and underneath rusted train trellises, forging pathways to a deeper look at America’s heartland. Town Square is reminiscent of Harper Lee’s Maycomb, where [...]

The hand stamp that verified concertgoers as legitimate at the Grog Shop tonight read “Keep Frozen.”  I tried to photograph mine, but the sweat generated from several consecutive hours of stomping rock smeared it enough to make it completely illegible; you’ll have to take my word for it.  The ringing in my ears and the [...]

Brian and I work together at the same 9-5, usually rolling into work at just about the same time each morning.  Typically, we trudge in unwillingly, tired and slugging espresso for the first three hours of the day.  Today, however, we both walked in a little more spry.
Both of us unfortunately left our MP3 players [...]

Cut Off Your Hands, New Zealand’s favorite jangle pop revivalist trio (they were a quartet until guitarist Mike Ramirez left the band amicably in December) released their debut LP, You and I (Frenchkiss Records), on Tuesday.  The album works in two rough modes, bouncing between sparkly, up-beat pop reminiscent of The Cure and slightly more [...]

I’m a scavenger.  I always have been.  I’m the type of guy that will peruse the internet until my eyeballs glaze over and trace circles on the page; pixels, links, kilobytes, and code sprawl endlessly until hours pass by into the cracking dawn.  I don’t do well with open space.  I inevitably tangle idle time [...]

There was a ton of weekend action at citizendick world headquarters, so we’ve got a bit of a grab bag today.
First, happy inauguration day; while we don’t want to push our radically leftist views on the readership, we’re pretty stoked for some change.  We also know that we have a regular reader in Washington D.C.; [...]

Every week when Aquarium Drunkard posts the playlist from his show on satellite radio, I’m somewhere between mildly and insanely jealous.  For two hours, one of our internet colleagues takes over the airwaves, delivering coolness to anybody who can afford to pay fifteen bucks a month to listen to the radio.  When I read that [...]

It’s midnight, and unless something strange happened today, we’ve reached our 1000th visitor.   I wonder who actually got the 1000th hit.  Maybe it’s the chicken rancher in Colombia that checks us out daily, or all of the pals we’ve made in Uganda flickin on the wi-fi for a quick stop.  Either way, we’re excited about [...]

Editor’s Note:  The music portion of South by Southwest takes place in Austin, Texas from March 18 -22 this year.  If everything goes to plan, the citizendicks will be there, ready to deliver killer coverage to our readers.  As part of our ramp-up for the trip, we’ll periodically be highlighting regional bands that will be [...]

What does Indiana sound like?  How do long stretches of road, carving unwaveringly through cornfields with no hills, no turns, no alteration in the scenery other than the occasional farmhouse, grain silo or hamlet, a grouping of houses around a school, a church and a grocery?  What sort of sonic landscape is inspired by the [...]

On December 27th, we were lucky enough to see the Dayton, Ohio trio, Heartless Bastards,  at The Beachland Ballroom in Cleveland.  If you read our review of the show, then you’ve already seen our reverence for this band.  The January 20th release of The Mountain promises, essentially, the emergence of what all of the critics and blogs have been [...]

There’s a strong tradition of writers using their forums to correct wrongs.  Aristophanes wrote plays that sought to change the way his society looked on war and injustice.   Upton Sinclair used his fiction to force the government to reform the food packing industry.  The lady who wrote Silent Spring cared a lot about birds or [...]

Harlem Shakes is coming to Grog Shop tomorrow night, and our inclination was initially to bring something new to the table to discuss.  Then we realized Technicolor Health hasn’t been released yet–We can simply re-post our January 12th album review.  This March 24th release already has smoothly worn edges from so many plays, and we’re [...]

When all of the white stuff stopped falling, we checked our watches, and realized we hadn’t posted anything since late Thursday evening.  We apologize for any delays.  Rest assured, however, that we’ve got some heavy-hitting album reviews fervently in the works.  You should begin to see some new stuff coming out starting Monday.
If you don’t [...]

Harlem Shakes made a splash in 2007 with the Burning Birthdays EP; you couldn’t throw a rock at the internet without hitting “Carpetbaggers” or “Sickos.”  2009 promises big things from the Brooklyn quintet.  They’re kicking off a tour with Tokyo Police Club on February 24th and will be releasing their first full-length on Gigantic in [...]