By Melissa B.
I love a good soundtrack, even for things I’ve not seen. I love the way that carefully chosen songs can convey a feeling and even a look, and that the use of music in a show or movie can make or destroy a moment.
(more…)
By Melissa B.
How fortunate the New Orleanians are: Once Christmas and New Year’s are over, they get to move straight into Carnival season. Parades, food, music, revelry, and the finest of these things, I’d wager, is the music.
I’ve often wondered how New Orleans can have so many obscenely talented, homegrown musicians. Is it the food, the humidity, the heritage, the proximity to water? Is there a great funk reservoir that all of the drinking water comes from? Do they put it in babies’ bottles at birth? Whatever causes it, there is a bumper crop of amazing New Orleans music out there and Meet Me At Mardi Gras puts it all in one convenient disc, making a party in your living room, or car, or ears. What have you.
(more…)
By Maureen
Let me just get this disclaimer out of the way: I fucking love Cillian Murphy. I would crawl through a river of shit, Andy Dufresne-style, just to listen to him read the phone book. Which, in a twisted and complex way, he kind of does in Enda Walsh’s play Misterman.
(more…)
By Kai Shuart
In the interest of full journalistic disclosure, I have to say that I know Melody Walker—the artist behind this CD—personally; I had the privilege of playing with her many times when we were both attending Humboldt State University and seeing her talent grow from her early days playing at Muddy Waters. We remain great friends to this day.
However, that does not diminish the fact that this is an outstanding record. The opening title track, “Gold Rush Goddess” intertwines the earthy images of dynamited mountains and the lusty image of a woman dancing for money and melds them into a cohesive allegory for exploitation, as evidenced in the lyric “Come down off that mountain/come down all you men/but don’t you come knockin’ without money in your hand.”
(more…)
By J Howell
The concept of the “sophomore slump” may be a tired old critical cliché, but it’s applicable often enough that when a band with a great debut gets around to that second record, one may find oneself a bit nervous. Thankfully, Peggy Sue—whose Fossils and Other Phantoms was likely the best debut album of last year—have not only avoided the second record hex, they’ve completely obliterated it. It’s difficult to recall another sophomore effort that so masterfully retained the best of its creators’ aesthetic while expounding upon it by orders of magnitude; the example that springs to mind is Castanets’ First Light’s Freeze, and like that record, Acrobats may well stand as a modern classic.
(more…)
By Chelsea Spear
To the layperson in the early ‘80s, punk rock was an atonal mess of a sound made by destructive adolescent boys with an all-consuming hunger for amphetamines and an allergy to shirts. In the documentary X: The Unheard Music, director W.T. Morgan and the punk band X challenge these stereotypes by focusing on the creative process and the day-to-day experiences of a working band trying to find their audience.
(more…)
By Jemiah Jefferson
It’s somewhat startling to realize that this is Thomas Dolby’s first album in twenty years. Since the 1992 non-success of Astronauts & Heretics, his last album of originals, Dolby busied himself in Silicon Valley, inventing and patenting applications involved in ring tone technology. This is the sort of thing that the cerebral, nay—pointy-headed—Dolby would do when the music industry started to bore him. But what happened after the man created his patents, got rich, got bored (again), and went home?
Once a musician, always a musician. Dolby began touring again, solo, several years ago, and to his audiences, dropped teasing hints that he was working on new music. A Map of the Floating City, in all its forms, is the result of that lengthy process, revealing painstaking perfectionism that occasionally gets in the way, but mostly creates a multilayered experience that develops in complexity with every revisit.
(more…)
By Danny R. Phillips
It seems that in some circle, including my own, cracking on hipsters has become somewhat of a sport. With their tragic coolness, bland color scheme in housing and clothes, poor music choices (does anyone REALLY like Bon Iver?), black eyeglasses, and Zach Galifianakis facial hair, the genus Hipsteris toocoolius has become a prime target for sarcasm and satire. And no show does it better than IFC’s Portlandia.
(more…)
By Ann Clarke
Filmed in Nashville in July of 2009, this DVD is a one-night glimpse into what was a reunion-ish tour that I really wish I’d had a chance at seeing (no shows came anywhere near me). But luckily someone had the sense to capture it (and capture it well, I might add!)
I had seen Jesus Lizard live footage before, but regrettably I have never seen them live. I had a good idea of what to expect, and what is captured on this DVD lives up to my expectations.
(more…)
By Paul Casey
As Paul Williams said in 1997—prematurely as it turns out—upon the release of 30 minutes of the SMiLE music on the Good Vibrations box set, SMiLE is Done. The release of The Smile Sessions by EMI and Capitol Records on November 1, 2011, is the end of a long strange journey. You can read my thoughts on the phenomenon of SMiLE in my other article, but this one is purely about the music.
(more…)