Justify Your Existence: Arlo

Up High in the Night(2001)
Stab the Unstoppable Hero(2002)

Must have gotten these two Arlo releases from a SubPop publicist. I’d have to go back and look at SubPop’s catalog releases during the early 2000s to see just how these fit into the stuff the label was putting out. Seems to me that it was between the mid-90s grunge/punk stuff and the later 2000s bearded folk stuff.
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Band(camp) of the Week: Love in October

Did a little web-searching on Chicago-by-way-of-Sweden’s Love in October and found previous comparisons to a bunch of bands that I’m too old to enjoy (The Plain White T’s, Motion City Soundtrack, blink-182). This made me a bit leery of checking out LiO’s newest EP, Love in October II. But considering the lack of investment (the EP is available to download for free through Feb. 8), I’m glad I checked it out.

While the band’s earlier influences have been Alternative Press cover boys in the last 10 years, it’s as if Erik and Kent Widman – the brothers and principal songwriters for LiO – decided to order some archived issues of AP from the mid-90s and create a sound more akin to bands like Pavement (“Paper Heart” reminds me of “Shady Lane”), The Dismemberment Plan and Modest Mouse (“Desperate”).

Recommended for fans of: Pavement, Modest Mouse, Weezer, Shout-Out Louds