Chatham County Line won last year’s Rockygrass band contest in part due to singer/guitarist Dave Wilson’s ability to change a guitar string mid-song without missing a lyric. The ovation after that song made the judge’s job easy. None of us that they were already signed to the excellent indie label Yep Roc Records. […]
I’m a sucker for a good musical scream. So when I heard some honest yelling in the sound clips on the Avett Brothers website, I knew I’d found something. The Avetts, banjo/guitar-playing brothers Scott and Seth and upright bassist Bob Crawford, are an aggressive folk trio. Like a lot of these bands, […]
Oh, those Canadians are so clever. Toronto artist Brian Joseph Davis’ latest creation, Greatest Hit, is a literal mashup of six greatest-hits albums - by Whitney Houston, Kenny G., the Carpenters, the Police, the Rolling Stones and Metallica - each compressed down to a single four-or-five-minute track. No fancy digital editing and arranging […]
I was trying to convince a friend to check out Belle and Sebastian’s If You’re Feeling Sinister recently. He tried several times to make it through the album, but couldn’t handle Stuart Murdoch’s vocals. I remembered a similar response the first time I heard them, so for the past couple months I’ve carried […]
It’s hard to know whether the debut CD from The Go! Team is good music, or if we’ve just been nurtured our entire lives to love this CD. The London buzz-band’s music is a combination of retro-hip hop, 80s dance floor vamps, and soundtracks to A-Team chase scenes. It’s a retro vein that […]
Sitting high atop MetaCritic’s All-Time High Scores list is Brian Wilson’s brilliant Smile. (Metacritic’s numerical ratings in this case may be slightly inflated, but the sentiment is correct.) Smile seems to have ushered in an overly-dense-symphonic-pop renaissance: last year’s Blueberry Boat and now this year’s sophomore release from Architecture in Helsinki, In Case […]
A couple weeks ago, I played a guest DJ set with my friend Damon Haley on Boulder’s KGNU. The recording of the show didn’t come out, so here’s all that remains, the playlist:
Fiery Furnaces - “My Dog Was Lost But Now He’s Found” (Blueberry Boat)
Super […]
The debut CD. It’s both a debut - intended to represent a young band to the world - and a CD - a timeless musical document. At some point during the recording of Bloc Party’s debut CD Silent Alarm the band and producer Paul Epworth had to make a choice: create a tight […]
From a purely practical perspective, the purpose of music reviews is to guide purchasing decisions. Next to the beloved numerical rating, “Buy this if you like XXX” is the best piece of information a critic can provide. But the problem with playing the sounds-like game is that it fills the listener with expectations […]
Psst… Some random person on the street pulled me aside and let me listen to the still unreleased Fiona Apple CD Extraordinary Machine. And I have to say: it’s fantastic. The ominous violins and cellos of opener “Not About Love” draw you in and the rest of the tracks never really let up. […]