Duck & Cover :: Indie rock music writing from Arcade Fire to the Zygotic Minci

Guest blogger Drew Zackary needs a day off. We wonder where he finds time to send us his guitar player's pick each month. The underground eats the years, breaks all your E strings; spits out death, obscure city workers, and suburban gardeners decades after the cocaine and long hair. . . I Digress. Robert Buras. 1975-2007. Found dead in his apartment in Oslo ( here's an amazing video of his band with him as the corpse ). Lead guitarist for Mudugrada. Lead singer and guitarist for My Midnight Creeps. I loved Mudurada for years before I understood it. Buras had the secret down. He played his soul through his right hand, man. Typically, when we watch the guitarist on stage, we focus on his orher left hand. But the soul-- the damn soul comes from the right hand . We can all marvel at the hyper speeds that the best players finger; the frets, pentatonic minor scales forward and backwards they play with their eyes closed. But it's those staccato upstrokes; the hard pounding; t...

Drew Zackary, citizen of earth and Old Denver, fights sleep to jot down his thoughts on Motel Motel's debut LP, New Denver. Sounds Like : New wave hipster psych- folk Americana with neither's existential terror or humor . . . and C-grade story-telling skills. Recommended if You Like : Eunuchized Nick Cave, Squirrel Nut Zippers on Bezodiazepines and PBR, or open mic night for folk-lovin' hipsters . . . and sleeping. Personal Reaction : Few bands practice and have visions of large orchestrations. And few bands of any experience level have such a grasp on what the arrangements should sound like recorded. This album is a great recording: great vocals, a keen understanding of the chordal structures of the lost traveling americana from the 20s, and a good mix of stringed intrumentation and other under-used instruments in rock. It's perfectly recorded and well thought out. Obviously made by people skilled in playing and passionate about making music they love. Yet for the gen...

Guest post by Drew Zackary Ed. Note: Sometimes, we at Duck & Cover solicit reviews from other writers or musicians. We value the insight they can provide into an industry, of which we are little more than casual observers. Sure, the D&C crew loves music, buys music, watches live music. The problem is we don't actually play music (high school trombone doesn't count as "music"). No matter. You get to a point in your life when you just have to accept the fact you're never going to be a rock star, and no Guitar Hero score will change that. So we go about our lives living vicariously through the musicians whose music we follow. The solicitations for their written opinions are little more than thinly disguised invitations to participate in our fantasy. Because we don't have rock star lives; we have geeky, music-hungry, shoe-obsessed lives. So when I received this month's Guitar Player Pick from sporadic contributor and dedicated guitarist, Drew Zackary,...

Guest post by Drew Zackary, guitar afficionado "So if I had a dime for every time I should've Stopped playing guitar and put my nose in a book Then my head would be healthy and my guitar would be dusty And that just might save me from a bunch of bad songs So maybe I'm too polite just like good Moses But just like good manners we've had enough of them." --Davey von Bohlen So this pick isn't so much about the guitar playing on Maritime's latest album as it is about Davey von Bohlen's long career as a guitar player. Personally, I have a special affinity for him. While we never met, his various bands' songs have found their way into my cars and living rooms for the past decade. He may also be the coolest, baldest, most left-handed sunburst Fender Telecaster player and father of two in rock today (who also had a fist sized tumor removed from his head AND survived a van crash). Bohlen truly deserves that oh-so-overused moniker of ‘underrated’. Pitchfork ...