Album Of The Week: Coliseum Sister Faith

This used to be what indie rock sounded like. During the 1990s, Elephant 6 and Belle And Sebastian were outliers, and the genre (which really was more genre and less loose lifestyle appellation) hadn't erased all traces of the get-in-the-van '80s hardcore that helped birth it. As late as a decade ago, when the Louisville trio Coliseum formed, the term "indie" evoked images of Pretty Girls Make Graves or Blood Brothers as much as, I don't know, Beulah, and it was still vaguely novel to hear a flugelhorn on a Sub Pop record. These days, Coliseum are creatures of the loose metal underground that's become our greatest resource for facepunch guitars, but they're not really a metal band. The ingredients of their sound come from other places: Pummeling locked-in bass-thuds from Girls Against Boys, swampy-but-skronky guitar fuzz-bursts from Sonic Youth, beardedly beery vocal blurts from about a thousand different bands. And with their new Sister Faith, Coliseum have made an album that stews all those influences into something powerfully satisfying and maybe even nourishing. It's not an innovative album by any means, but it might scratch an itch that you didn't even know you had.