// Category Archive for: Music Reviews

Music Review: Holly Golightly & The Brokeoffs, All Her Fault

By Melissa Bratcher

There’s a delightful ramshackle quality to the newest album by Holly Golightly & The Brokeoffs. All Her Fault has a spontaneous, lively sound, and wickedly witty lyrics. It’s the kind of album that is not only instantly engaging, but also gets better with each listen.

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Music Review: Beck, Morning Phase

By Less Lee Moore

Morning Phase, Beck’s newest album and his first on Capitol Records, has been described as a companion piece to 2002’s Sea Change. Since I hadn’t heard Sea Change in a while, I thought I’d compare the two albums. What I discovered surprised me.

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Music Review: Wild Beasts, Present Tense

By Less Lee Moore

Present Tense, the latest album from Wild Beasts, is like the feeling of holding your breath and fighting back tears while watching an emotionally distressing movie in a quiet theater. You want to give in to your emotions, but the strain has a profoundly exquisite painfulness. Present Tense is darker and more somber than the band’s previous two albums and features far less florid prose. This doesn’t mean the lyrics are any less insightful; it simply means listeners must work harder to decipher them and reveal the beauty within. There’s nothing that’s not beautiful about Present Tense, even when it paints unpleasant portraits.

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Music Review: The Woodentops, Granular Tales

By Melissa Bratcher

After a 25-year recording hiatus, The Woodentops have reappeared with Granular Tales, a pleasing return to form. The amazing thing? They don’t sound at all like a band that’s not recorded in a quarter of a century. Granular Tales is, for the most part, vital and alive and inventive.

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Music Review: Big Ben Tribe, Lè Travo, Victrola (Dark Entries Reissues)

By Less Lee Moore

Dark Entries has quickly become one of my favorite labels, via both their new releases as well as their reissues of more obscure New Wave and dance music from the ’70s and ’80s. Their most recent reissues are from Big Ben Tribe, Lè Travo, and Victrola.

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Music Review: Temples, Sun Structures

By Less Lee Moore

When the time comes move with the feeling,
Lend your young ears to the sound of day.
—Temples, “Move With The Season”

Upon a first listen to Sun Structures, the debut album from Temples, it’s tempting to wonder if they’re time travelers. Sun Structures is drenched in late ’60s and early ’70s psychedelia, full of fuzzy, chiming guitars, phase shifters, mellotrons, faux sitars, and harps. Certainly there are curmudgeons out there who would roll their eyes at “England’s premier retro-futurists,” sputtering the names of a long list of bands from whom these four young men are blatantly stealing. Yet Temples cheerfully admits to their influences, with dozens of YouTube clips posted on their Facebook page indicating who has provided inspiration.

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Music Review: Clan Of Xymox, Matters Of Mind, Body And Soul

By Hanna

Matters Of Mind, Body And Soul is the first Clan of Xymox studio album in several years, since 2012’s cover album Kindred Spirits. Because of this, and their sudden and short recent return to L.A., there has been some tradgoth excitement about this release. The result is safe but not boring: on the one hand, this album sounds like their music has always sounded; on the other, it’s new and varied.

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Music Review: I Break Horses, Chiaroscuro

By Less Lee Moore

Chiaroscuro is defined as “the technique of using light and shade in pictorial representation.” It’s a ideal name for the second album from I Break Horses, the musical project from Swedish singer/songwriter Maria Lindén. Rather than a contrast between light and shade, however, the songs on Chiaroscuro are a study in the interplay between the retro synths of ’80s shoegaze and the more contemporary flavors of techno and EDM. In a way, Chiaroscuro reminds me a lot of School of Seven Bells’ Ghostory, but while that album was crystalline ice, these songs are like smoldering embers.

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Music Review: Shelly Bhushan, Something Out Of Nothing

By Melissa Bratcher

With a voice as soulful as Shelly Bhushan’s, Something Out Of Nothing could have taken a straight R&B route, and she could have thrown in boatloads of melisma to impress. Instead, she’s turned in an album full of interesting, unexpected arrangements and thoughtful lyrics, and presented them with her gorgeous, versatile voice. Something Out Of Nothing is a stealth charmer.

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Music Review: Love, Poetry and Revolution – A Journey Through The British Psychedelic and Underground Scenes 1966-72

By Melissa Bratcher

In just six short years, British Psychedelic bands went from singing songs about tea to songs about witches. Love, Poetry and Revolution: A Journey Through The British Psychedelic and Underground Scenes 1966-72 is a recent three-disc boxed set that plumbs the depths of the psychedelic revolution and collects these little-heard rarities alongside thoughtful, witty liner notes from compiler David Wells. Forgoing the more easily accessible, overplayed songs, Wells gives the listener gems by bands that never landed a recording contract, or perhaps only put out one album, alongside demos and alternate takes of more familiar artists like The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown and The Spencer Davis Group.

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