The second release by fuzzy Olympia based K recs group The Curious Mystery slides out the gate with a slow, dark majesty.
CloverSeeds use the dramatic sweep of metal anthemry to provide character for their widescreen tunes.
What began as McBride’s solo project in the early aughts throughout small dives in Brooklyn has since grown into a massive crowd-pleasing pulse reverberating across the U.S. and Europe.
It’s hard for me to wrap my head around it, but the *Jayhawks*’ Hollywood Town Hall is almost 20 years old.
More Sense Than Money is once again the kind of excellent record that leaves one wondering why Garfields Birthday aren’t legends in the power pop underground.
Lia Ices’ sophomore is, in a word, gorgeous. It glows warm, so bask in it.
Lonely Scientist arrives as silvery and hushed as its evocative cover art, peering through the windshield and wondering which came first, the big empty landscape or man’s bemused and lonely reaction to it via acoustic guitar.
Still rather blatantly under the sway of Porcupine Tree and Talk Talk, Duda uses keyboards, acoustic guitars and swaying grooves to create lush prog/pop tunes, with an even finer edge than on the first record.
The Junkies cover the late, great Vic Chesnutt in the second volume of four in their “Nomad Series”.
This fresh new group of misfit rockers have forged a sound entirely unique out of the sagging genres of punk, garage and metal.
It’s been nearly 30 years since GoF’s illustrious original catalog was released, and to think or desire that the band would simply ape its old self is unfair.
This collection, much of which (or all of which, perhaps) appeared on previous Released Emotions tributes to these three bands, is a hit and mostly miss affair.
Sit down for the whole hour and 18 songs and take in the charming, lightly perfumed, but soulful air.
Blindfolded, I’d not be certain that Mr. Sloane was not Bono, so much does he sing and sound like him.
Anyone out there miss the Libertines U.K.? One could slip this album into the player at your next party and easily convince all in attendance that this is their new third LP.
Though it’s surprising to see this 1972 smash hit record reissued on an indie, that says more about the state of the music business nowadays than about the quality of this recording or the band.
Their succinct, unerring taste has slipped big-time this time ‘round.
As someone who has known and enjoyed Mr. Steele’s work for 31 years now, it’s nevertheless hard to say what the point of this short, eight-song covers album is.
Horribly over-praised in its time, 1965’s September is an alpha male prematurely facing a far-off mortality, expressing an overly sentimental melancholy over lost youth.
I’ve been hearing this sort of lushly lulling female vocalist for a long time. Tired of it I’m not!
The lyrics are outrageously nutty, often embarrassingly frankly funny, and the post-punk attack is as herky-jerky, unpredictable, and sometimes as outright insane as the words.
Despite being a key member of three of the most important New Zealand bands ever, The Clean, Magick Heads, and his prime singer/songwriting vehicle The Bats, it’s safe to say that Scott is still one of the more underrated singer/songwriters of the last 30 years.
This young L.A. multi-instrumentalist jazz cat has cut chops working with various jazz legends, among them Bennie Maupin , Arthur Blythe , and Henry Grimes.
Rose is a striking-looking, brunette-haired L.A. newcomer with Chicago roots that needs little more than her chords and harmoniously honey voice to make her lyrics dig in on her debut, even on initial encounter.
If you’re looking for more punk rock from SideoneDummy, would you accept the kind that goes back 80 years instead of 35?
When one finally deals with what’s here as opposed to what one would truly love, Live on the Sunset Strip is a genuinely sweaty, hard-working, exciting sounding, wonderfully recorded, must-have.
Although this two-girl, one boy trio are from Brighton in the south coast of England, they sound more like something on Nebraska’s Saddle Creek label—not a zillion miles removed from Azure Ray and Mynabirds, et al.
As the decades pass, it’s amazing how each generation mints a new round of artists who remind of the early ‘70s Neil Young.
If the theme of 2010 was an absolute plethora of inspired albums by people who’d been making them for decades, not a handful of years, you can go ahead and add this one to that pleasant development.
Typically described as an alt-country star, her latest barely betrays such nomenclature, bearing up instead as a folk pop and soft singer-songwriter rock foray, with only minor country inflections.
On the Seattle trio’s second LP, they are trying to answer the question no one was asking, namely, “Does the world need an American Belle & Sebastian?”
I confess, I find Ms. Marling’s prodigious, precocious talent and her back-story more consuming than her actual albums.
Most double LPs are “sprawling,” but this isn’t; it’s focused on tough, catchy, old fashioned roots-rock, with southern blues and R&B flavors.
But how pleasantly big a surprise to find that they’ve kept their challenging, moody guitar rock base, yet totally overhauled the formula, pumping up the volume into a five times heavier, louder, denser, more pulsating framework!
Hopes and expectations don’t always pan out.
You wonder who at the label had the temerity to sign and promote German composer Volker Bertelmann , a pianist by trade whose classical chamber music bears no hint of rock whatsoever, as if it had never been invented.
Berkeley CA’s John Ringhofer must have ADD. His fifth LP for Asthmatic Kitty is a study in “get in, get out, do your business… and run away before anyone gets a clue of what you’re up to!”
This Barcelona band’s fourth LP still sounds a lot more like they’re an American band out of Los Angeles clubs than anything that might bear their true Castilian markings.
Singer/songwriter Gouette is a staple of the busy New London, CT scene and its documenting Cosmo label, appearing on its various scene compilations, and issuing three singles and now two LPs for the imprint.
While one would want to avoid an electric jellyfish while swimming, not so the band of that name.
The seventh installment of Dondero’s solo career finds the old hand Austin, TX folkie as ever mining that bittersweet intersection—can we call it the crossroads?—where ancient Dixie folk, blues, and country pop meet and have a shot of White Lightning at the local saloon.
Having just reviewed this reformed band’s new EP, here’s the other one also released this year—although in this case, the recordings date from the late ‘70s Manchester band’s first revival, back in 1995, but they were unissued until now.
The trend of bands from the late ‘70s/’80s reforming and doing work that doesn’t embarrass their halcyon days continues!
Although this is the debut LP (following some 2009 EPs) by an L.A. street punk band, they sure want to be an early ‘80s English Oi! Band.
If you’re throwing a shindig any time soon, this pioneering 26-year New Orleans country-punk trio led by Bill Davis (the sole original member) wants to be invited.
Fifty-five years is a hell of a long career (albeit with several long breaks for serious illness and injury), but few have earned it more richly than Dale.
The hardest trick for a roots-rock/pop, americana, or alt.country band is to take something that’s that traditional—what’s a hundred years?—and try to make it sound contemporary instead of boringly old-timey, like a singing group playing on Disney’s fake-as-folksy Main Street.
Though the excuse for this release is the 80th anniversary of Charles birth, none is needed for an artist of whom the tag “genius” really wasn’t and still isn’t a stretch.
I lavished deserved praise on this Beverly, MA (greater Boston) instrumental group’s The Four Trees double album debut three years ago, this CD reissue of the group’s 2005 debut EP is more of the same only even more commanding!
When last we heard from this Aussie folkpop singer three years ago on When I Cross the River , our own Mark Suppanz was comparing his delicate grace and involved guitar playing to Tim Buckley and Nick Drake.
