// Category Archive for: Music Reviews

Music Review: Voivod, Post Society EP

By Tim Murr

Formed in Quebec in 1983, the prog-metal masters Voivod have shifted and mutated, thrilling fans across 13 studio albums. Their 1984 debut album, War and Pain, was a paint-peeling thrash classic. It was to metal what The Road Warrior was to cinema; a line in the sand for others to dash across. With each album up to Angel Rat, when the band started to splinter, Voivod progressed and evolved their sci-fi Rush-meets-Motorhead approach.

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Music Review: Penny & Sparrow, Let A Lover Drown You

By Melissa Bratcher

Penny & Sparrow’s Let A Lover Drown You is the kind of album that feels like you shouldn’t be hearing it. It’s remarkably intimate and naked. It’s emotionally raw, but produced so beautifully that raw isn’t quite the right word. Bare. Honest. Personal. It made me feel like a voyeur listening to it, in the way that sometimes Iron and Wine’s Sam Beam’s songs do. These are quietly organic moments, snapshots of lives, that happen to be gorgeous songs.

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Music Review: Marc Stone, Poison & Medicine

By Melissa Bratcher

Though he was born in New York, Marc Stone’s adopted home of New Orleans is an undeniable presence in his album, Poison & Medicine. It’s there in the swampy groove of the opener, “I Tried.” It’s there in the killer horns of “When You’re Bad.” It’s there in Stone’s wondrous slide guitar work. It certainly doesn’t hurt that for the past two decades, Marc Stone has been backing a who’s who of seminal NOLA artists like Ernie K-Doe, Marcia Ball, Rockin’ Dopsie, and Terrance Simien, as well as hosting WWOZ’s “Soul Serenade” (incidentally, you can listen to WWOZ streaming on the Internet, and you should. All the time. And send them money at pledge drive time).

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Music Review: La Sera, Music For Listening To Music To

By Melissa Bratcher

La Sera is back and things have changed. Their newest, Music For Listening To Music To, is a kinder, gentler album than their last effort, 2014’s wonderful Hour Of The Dawn. It lacks the bite of Hour Of The Dawn, but perhaps that’s the result of front woman Katy Goodman being newly married (to guitarist/cowriter/band mate Todd Wisenbaker) and in lurve and all of that. The songs are less challenging and not as confrontational. That’s unfortunate.

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Music Review: Bill Carter, Innocent Victims & Evil Companions

By Melissa Bratcher

Texas-based Bill Carter may be best known for co-writing Stevie Ray Vaughan’s biggest hit, “Crossfire.” You may also know him from “Anything Made of Paper,” written for the West Memphis Three’s Damien Echols, and featured in the documentary West Of Memphis. Or you might know him as a member of the band P, a collaboration with Butthole Surfers’ Gibby Haynes, Johnny Depp, and Sal Jenco. With his newest album, Innocent Victims & Evil Companions, you’ll know him as a songwriter with poetic lyrics, a singer with a fabulous ragged tenor, and the master of fine tunes.

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Music Review: Wolfmother, Victorious

By Tyler Hodg

Since taking the rock world by storm in 2005 with their debut self-titled album, Wolfmother has been subject to some major changes, including a plethora of band members coming in and out of the lineup. One aspect that has remained intact over the last decade is the general sound of the band, and the latest release from the Australian group, Victorious, is yet another addition to their cohesive catalogue.

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Music Review: Golden Daze, Golden Daze

By Tim Murr

Shoegaze or Dream Pop was a genre I always liked in theory, but was never really able to embrace back in the early 1990s. So I don’t have a terribly wide frame of reference for reviewing Golden Daze’s self-titled debut, but leaving the album on hours-long loops has been a very enjoyable experience. Does this mean I like shoegaze and dream pop now? I guess so!

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Music Review: Emitt Rhodes, Rainbow Ends

By Melissa Bratcher

Where do we begin with Emitt Rhodes? He began gaining notoriety as the leader of 1960s band the Merry Go Round, who had the hits “Live” and “You’re A Very Lovely Woman.” In 1971, he released his critically acclaimed eponymous debut and the reputation as a “one-man Beatles,” so pure were his power pop hooks (and the fact that he wrote, produced, and recorded his album in his studio). He released Farewell To Paradise in 1973 and then… radio silence. Bad deals, shady contracts, it’s not a new story.

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Music Review: Santigold, 99¢

By Melissa Bratcher

Santigold’s follow up to 2012s dark Master Of My Make-Believe, is 99¢, a brighter, single-packed outing. She’s joined by a passel of new collaborators, including Rostam Batmanglij, Zeds Dead, Haze Banga, and Sam Dew. Her new tracks are inventive and fresh, exploring the current commercial nature of our culture. “We have no illusion that we don’t live in this world where everything is packaged. People’s lives, persona, everything, is deliberate, and mediated. It can be dark and haunting and tricky, and freak us out, but it can be also be silly and fun and we can learn to play with it,” she says.

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Retro Review: The Zombies, Odessey and Oracle

By Lenny Kaye

An Odessey in more ways than one, beyond the Y. These days the answer to that questioning why? is apparent, the oracular pronouncement of a classic album regarded as a touchstone for thoughtful, intelligent pop, as much a part of the last century’s sixties’ meritocracy as anything by their more famous peers. The irony is that by the time the Zombies made the album that is their crowning achievement, working in an Abbey Road Studio just recently vacated by the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and the Pink Floyd’s mercurial Piper, and saw its last-gasp single suddenly break worldwide, the group had already begun to part ways, moving into the seventies on their own solo missions without the refraction of each other.

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