// Category Archive for: Music

Music Review: Duncan Browne, Planet Earth: The Transatlantic/Logo Years 1976-1979

By Hanna

This year would have marked Duncan Browne’s 70th birthday, had he not died in 1993. It also marks the 40th anniversary of the Metro album. Extensive re-releases of Duncan Browne’s work are rare, and anyone looking for his music will be happy with this reissue containing all his late 1970s work for Logo/Transatlantic: his two solo albums The Wild Places and Streets of Fire but also the entire Metro album.
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Top 20 Alice Cooper Deep Cuts

By Tim Murr

Alice Cooper, 69 years young, has reunited with three members of the original Alice Cooper Band and hit the road to support their new album, Paranormal. This will be the first new Alice album in six years and the first with Michael Bruce, Dennis Dunaway, and Neal Smith since 1973’s Muscle Of Love. On the official Alice website you can find videos of the reunited group playing in Nashville recently(with a current member of Alice’s touring band standing in for the departed Glen Buxton). They sound fantastic.

Alice himself still looks good, but who knows how many more years anyone has, so if Alice comes to your town, try not to miss it! I saw him on the Theater of Death Tour a few years ago and then a year or so later playing with Iron Maiden and the shows were phenomenal.

So in honor of a new Alice album I thought I’d make you an imaginary mix tape of the top 20 best deep tracks from across Alice’s storied career!
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Music Review: Modern Mal, The Misanthrope Family Album

By Melissa Bratcher

Modern Mal is the meeting of a pair of Northern Michigan songwriters, Rachel Brooks and Brooks Robbins. It’s a little psychedelic, a little surfy, a bit garagey, sometimes folky, and it can all be covered by the umbrella of Americana, but perhaps a more Gothic strain.
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Music Review: Honeybeat: Groovy 60s Girl-Pop

By Melissa Bratcher

There is no better mood raiser than a girl-group compilation. This is a scientific fact (that perhaps I have just made up). Finding long-lost girl groups, hearing those sweet harmonies, losing yourself in that “falling in love feeling”: it’s the best kind of bliss. A new compilation from ChaChaCharming and Real Gone Music, Honeybeat: Groovy 60s Girl-Pop, is an instant happy maker, with groups that are unfamiliar, groups that really should have made it, and some names that are a delightful surprise.
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Music Review: Cait Brennan, Third

By Melissa Bratcher

Cait Brennan’s follow up to her critically acclaimed debut, Debutante, is a stunner. Where Debutante felt like the incredibly talented bastard daughter of Harry Nilsson and ELO, who fell asleep while listening to AM radio in the 1970s and made an album about it, Third lives and breathes where it was born: Ardent Studios in Memphis. Third is muscular and fierce, but it can break your heart with a word.
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Werewolves In Siberia Return With Two Perfect Releases

By Tim Murr

I’ve never met Chris Cavoretto in person, but I’m intimately familiar with his music. If the name doesn’t ring a bell with you, Chris is the man behind the synth-wave project Werewolves in Siberia. Every time I’m listening to his music, the image I have is of a man in a dark basement, surrounded by computers and synthesizers, getting all garage-Frankenstein.
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Music Review: Chris Milam, Kids These Days

By Melissa Bratcher

While the centerpiece of Chris Milam’s Kids These Days is a trio of breakup songs, focusing on before, during, and after a breakup, there’s so much more going on here. Milam has questions that he would like answered, memories he’d like to share. He also has the heart of a philosopher. Kids These Days could easily fall under the catch=all of Americana, but it’s more than just that. It’s gritty guitars and incredibly tasteful strings, and Milam’s versatile voice that easily sweeps to an elegant falsetto from ragged emotion.
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Concert Review: Bryan Ferry at Playhouse Square

By Julie Finley

March 26, 2017
Cleveland, OH

I am happy to say that I had heard about Bryan Ferry returning to Cleveland through Ferry’s Facebook page. There was so little publicity through any regional entertainment outlet that were it not for Facebook, I would have never even known about the show. I covered Ferry’s performance last time he played in Cleveland, and to be quite honest, I thought that was going to be the first and only time I would ever get to see him perform live. So I am very surprised (and elated) that he came back!
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Music Review: The Warden, L-I-V-I-N

By Melissa Bratcher

Only The Warden could change my mind about “Kokomo.” To refresh your memory, The Warden is Ward Richmond, an East Dallas hellraiser who sings about drinking and regretting, honky-tonking and shenanigans, and he does it with style and aplomb. On his welcome return, L-I-V-I-N, The Warden dips into a variety of genres that are all filtered through his particularly Texas vibe.
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Twilight Fauna Returns With “The Year The Stars Fell”

By Tim Murr

Johnson City’s Twilight Fauna is an Appalachian atmospheric/ambient/black metal project created by Paul Ravenwood. I stumbled across Twilight Fauna a few years ago and I was really struck by the power and emotional depth Ravenwood captured. The idea of mountain metal was something else that I’d never considered and was intrigued by.
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