I’ve told you before that we don’t generally do high energy dance music here at Citizen Dick.  World Headquarters is usually a pretty buttoned-up place, packed with stern looking fellows carefully listening to delicate folk masterworks or parsing through noise-rock opuses. (Is that the plural of opus?  Opi?  Anybody?)  Every once in a while, something [...]

Full disclosure:  It’s been a crap week at the day job.  I was halfway to ditching out completely on a new music review today in favor of writing 1500 words detailing Pavement’s significance in my formative years as a music fan; that would have been easy, requiring no real mental effort, and would have given [...]

Like a blaze of fury, LA-based girl outfit, Mika Miko are set to drop We Be Xuxa on May 5th, and in paying homage to the entirely refreshing 21 minutes it takes to listen to the entire record, I’ve decided to write this review in the same amount of time.  I typically choose to shun [...]

Paul and the Patients are lobbing a five song EP into the ether on May 26th.  The Brooklyn-based quintet, fronted by the eponymous Paul Holmes, have been rattling around New York for about a year, honing Holmes’ jangly, but tuneful  pseudo-punk songs on the stage.  The EP, To the Lions, offers a ton of insight [...]

I hate to say it, but we have a case of the Mondays today here at Citizen Dick HQ.  It’s been a rough weekend on all fronts for us Dicks and as a result we don’t have a full-on album review for you to enjoy this morning.  But fear not dear reader, we do have [...]

(Editor’s note:  We’d like to take this Lazy Saturday to point the spotlight at an Ohio band that never got as big as they deserved to and moved off the stage too quickly.  We’ve also got a track from somebody you’ve heard of before.  If you’re only here because you were searching for a Walkmen [...]

It has been a crazy week here at Citizen Dick and around the world, chock full of special occasions and semi-holidays.  In case you haven’t been paying attention, we had the Snuggie Pub Crawl here in Chicago on Saturday, 4/20 on Monday (I’m not quite sure what this means myself, but I have been told [...]

For some reason I have been sick or rock n’ roll lately, at least in the traditional sense.  I am sure it’s just a passing phase, but as of right now I am tired of predictable guitar riffs, fed up with catchy pop-inspired hooks, and if I hear another anthemic chorus I think I might [...]

Citizen Dick favorites Blood Red Dancers recently passed along to us that they’ll be entering the studio in July, with a new record set to smack the universe in the face sometime in August.  Fans of the brutal and literary lyricism, punching, throbbing bass, wanderingly nefarious keyboards and pounding percussion of last year’s EP Let [...]

Mrs. Citizen and I hit the Cleveland Museum of Art last weekend.  While the museum is still in the midst of a mammoth construction project, a few galleries are open again and there are special exhibits popping up on a pretty consistent basis.  Currently, they’ve got a special collection of Lee Friedlander’s photography and an [...]

Brakes is a band that’s similar to riding on an old school seesaw.  You know exactly the kind I’m talking about.  Splintered wood seats and paint-chipped steel could not possibly scare me now as much as it did when I was a wee lad.  I always had the asshole friend that would jump off the [...]

The world conspired against me on Record Store Day, 2009.  My dog came down with a wicked case of Bordetella and was hacking up masses of sputum all over the house, immediately before I was slated to pile into the Dickmobile and head to Music Saves to celebrate all that is wonderful about independent music.  [...]

Crocodiles debut full length, out on Fat Possum on April 28 opens with forty-eight seconds of fuzzed out organ and ambient electrical hum; the title of that track is “Screaming Chrome.”  Most of the time, I’d poke fun at an opening track that only serves as a palette cleanser, calling it a waste of space, [...]

In case anyone missed it, we had the opportunity to speak with the folks at The Hype Machine for their brand new weekly radio broadcast.  Based on our review of The Thermals’ new album, Now We Can See, I was able to sit down and chat with Dev from Hypem Radio regarding the release, the band, [...]

Imagine my surprise when sifting through pages and pages of Google Analytics information to find we finally picked up a reader in Ufa, the captiol of The Republic of Bashkortostan.  Although these things come off as tongue and cheek, we here at Citizen Dick sincerely get a kick out of seeing our fandom stretch into [...]

(Editor’s Note:  You know from last week about our unabashed love for the Life archive.  The above image is described there as follows: “Hitchiking hippie Randy Brook playing a guitar while panhandling.” Obviously, if you are Randy Brook get in touch.  We’d like to post a track or two.  More importantly, we want to know [...]

Though I thoroughly enjoyed Kevin’s entry last week, and I sincerely thank him for stepping in and guest-writing my weekly Hodge Podge, I must say that it’s good to be back as king of all things TGIF.  I’ve been back home in Chicago for the better part of a week now, and I think that [...]

Steve McBean is my homeboy.  Dude spits out records of worth each and every time.  I’ve been with Black Mountain since the beginning, and had the first Pink Mountaintops release in 2004. I bought into it just as much as BM.  The lag time between Black Mountain’s eponymous debut and In the Future would have [...]

That’s the front of the IRS building up there.  It might be a titch difficult to make out, but the inscription reads, “Taxes are what we pay for a civilized society.”  No less a personage than Oliver Wendell Holmes said that.  I’d probably disagree with Ollie and argue that taxes are what we pay for [...]

Maybe Bossanova wasn’t the best Pixies album to start off my understanding of the band, but some things are impossible to go backwards on.  I remember getting that album in early 1991 and its futuristic lyrics and dreamy undertones were like candy for me.  Black Francis is the man, and no matter what particular Pixies [...]