A collaboration between LUKE STEELE of THE SLEEPY JACKSON and NICK LITTLEMORE of PNAU.
It’s so damn difficult to mix African music with rock & roll. EXTRA GOLDEN gets the blend right on its third album.
While Sir Lord Von Raven is lonely, lonely, really lonely. He’s still very lonely. He’s Oakland lonely. Ocean lonely. Happy Parts Go-To-Bakeries Lonely. Fats Time Domino FLies Lonely. Chip Shoulder Glamour Grit Lonely. Dorian Grey Mike-The-Cat Lonely…Look him in the eyes, and ask him if he’s satisfied? Death-of-a-ladies-man Buster Poindexter lonely. Same-drummer-as-Brian-Glaze-lonely (Take him quiz question; does Jay Bronzini’s drumming style have anything particularly Italian about it?) Oh solo mio (lonely!).
The Morphine Berry Story is a perfect example of a fully realized individual vision of the blues.
Originally released on Creation in 1992, this awkwardly titled sophomore album is a fine examples of postpunk psychedelic rock/pop.
It’s some of the best power-pop I’ve ever heard and fans of the period and sound should run, not walk, to get this.
“Hills Like White Elephants” is the perfect folk pop hit single, at least in the universe I inhabit.
Adam Trice and his crew create finely honed, melancholy roots rock.
The MUSIC LOVERS should, by all rights, be major cult figures.
One of the great post-punk bands, 23 Skidoo probably owes its relative obscurity (compared to pals Cabaret Voltaire) to its frequent and radical style-shifts.
53rd State is Race’s 16th solo album, and it’s a damned good one.
One of the best compilation albums I’ve heard in a long time.
FLOWERS IN FLAMES may hail from Ohio in the ‘aughts, but its members’ hearts lie in England in the 80s.
Amazingly, this is the first time either of the band’s first two albums, originally released on Homestead in the mid-80s, have been on CD.
Fugitive Songs doesn’t have the immediate impact of past Jones classics like Fait Accompli, but repeated listens reveal its grimy charms.
Once known as the Years and signed to the currently bankrupt TVT Records, LIONS IN THE STREET left behind an onerous deal and a debut LP thrust into limbo for artistic freedom and a new life as an independent rock & roll unit.
Son of STEVE EARLE, named in part for TOWNES VAN ZANDT, JUSTIN TOWNES EARLE was probably consigned to a life in American music before he learned to walk.
Nightjar is Willson-Piper’s sixth album, and it’s a low-key gem.
Dear Catastrophe Waitress is one of the most moving works of fiction I’ve ever read.
Communion floods two sprawling CDs with powerhouse melodies and striking performances.
Outrageous Cherry’s most consistently engaging album, and that’s saying a lot.
The gorgeous music gives the impression less of an entry into despair than an exit out of the dark.
On their fourth album together, KOEN HOLTKAMP and BRENDON ANDEREGG construct sonic landscapes that mix their anti-virtuoso/timbre-focused playing of musical instruments, field recordings, and electronic treatments.
The Pittsburgh duo recalls the glory days of 70s combos like GOBLIN, POPOL VUH or even TANGERINE DREAM.
WEIRD OWL manages the neat trick of sounding retro and modern at the same time.
Genesis P-Orridge says goodbye and pays homage to Lady Jaye
It’s difficult to believe that In the Late Bright is only the eighth TOMMY KEENE studio album in a career that goes back nearly 30 years.
Here’s a third round of reviews posted here and nowhere else! In case you missed my last two posts, we had a nice backlog of several dozen reviews that there was not room for in the current issue 63, or we received the albums right as we were going to press. / Farewell, Lux Interior, a moving recollection by Marcel Feldmar!
The perpetually underrated LOVETONES return in style with their fourth album.
I don’t know about you, but I feel better knowing that the world has ROBYN HITCHCOCK in it.
Alan Jourgenson bids adieu to Ministry and revs up the glam machine.
It’s steeped in the more lush, melodic aspects of the Me Decade as Johnstone mixes and matches sonics borrowed from various CSN&Y, BIG STAR, POCO and PAUL MCCARTNEY records.
The album’s snarling, sexy attack is a lean, mean mélange of gritty 70s punk, aggressive garage rock and wide-eyed sleaze.
It’s inevitable that the ASYLUM STREET SPANKERS’ unclassifiable mixture of blues, vaudeville, jazz, C&W, cabaret, comedy, rock, etc. would hit the (off-)Broadway stage.
Catnip Dynamite is the greatly anticipated follow-up to the debut, and those who loved the first record will be pleased to know that there’s not a trace of sophomore slump here.
Producer CHRIS ROBINSON gives the duo a back porch/living room atmosphere, as if you’ve stumbled onto a couple of old buddies running through songs they used to play together, as well as showing off new ones.
Austin, Texas is known for its roots rock scene, but it also has, thanks to the great ROKY ERICKSON, a rich psychedelic rock tradition.
Cocksure swagger cuddles with bruised romantic yearning as Klasson unselfconsciously adopts the rock & roll myth.
Here’s a second round of reviews posted here and nowhere else! In case you missed my post from a week ago, we had a nice backlog of several dozen reviews that there was not room for in the current issue 63, or we received the albums right as we were going to press. So again, I thought, let’s put them here for you for now so that you can still read them—and to give those of you who have not seen one of our issues before a taste of what we have been doing in our pages these last 29 years (wow, that’s a long time, isn’t it?). As promised last week, I will try to post them all, a dozen at a time, in this space. So keep checking back every few days and you will find more!
While the EP is only two songs long, there is enough seduction and redemption for an entire record.
Tonight (Friday 1/30, 6:30) Shiraishi will be at Japan Society, reading with Itaru and participating in a discussion moderated by Forrest Gander. Saturday afternoon at 2 she will be at the Bowery Poetry Club, again with Itaru, who is quite a wonderful and imaginative player; also reading will be Beat legend Ira Cohen, health permitting, and Steve Dalachinsky, who will furthermore pitch in with Shiraishi on the English/Japanese tandem parts. I will be there.
The Damned have released their first album in seven years and thankfully the wait was well worth it.
Another year, another fine show from Neil Young’s archives. This one is compiled from two solo acoustic shows on consecutive nights in Ann Arbor, before his solo debut had been released.
Nobody else has reimagined the basics of rock so drastically or so well in a long time.
David Eugene Edwards’ latest effort under the Woven Hand banner is more fearsome and relentless than anything he’s previously done.
I don’t often wish I were in Los Angeles, but if I could be there November 7-8 at the Hollywood Bowl, I would, because forty years after its November 1968 release, Van Morrison will be performing his album Astral Weeks with two of the musicians he recorded it with.
It’s Anderson’s Astral Weeks, not in sound but feeling, in the internal journey of it and the transcendence it reaches for.
October 1973 (35 years ago) marked ABC’s last-ditch attempt to garner a hit for this album: They released the single “My Old School,” backed by “Pearl of the Quarter.” It didn’t work.
