// Category Archive for: Music Reviews

Music Review: Kelley Stoltz, Double Exposure

By Melissa Bratcher

San Francisco’s Kelley Stoltz has made the jump from SubPop to Third Man Records and has embraced the garage rock ethos fully—Double Exposure was recorded in his garage. Not a mere garage this: it goes by the name of Electric Duck Studio and houses vintage synths, an amp used by a Stooge, and a tape machine used by The Residents.

Double Exposure is garagey in the best way. It’s full of exploration and experimentation, and all kinds of noises not naturally occurring in nature. It’s reminiscent of the ’60s psychedelia revival from the ’80s ala the Fuzztones and Fleshtones and their brethren, awash in handclaps and harmonies.

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Music Review: Allen Toussaint, Songbook

By Melissa Bratcher

Allen Toussaint has probably written your favorite song, and you didn’t even know it. His new album, the remarkable, amazing Songbook, is a live recording (including a DVD of the performance) of Allen Toussaint, a piano, and his venerable back catalogue. His songs have been covered by such diverse artists as The Rolling Stones, Glen Campbell, Warren Zevon, Devo, Irma Thomas, and The Who. Listening to Songbook, you can’t help but marvel at his songwriting brilliance.

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Allen Toussaint was flooded out of his home and studio and relocated to New York City. There he began to perform solo shows at Joe’s Pub, resurrecting songs he hadn’t performed in years, honing his live show, and developing a passionate following outside of New Orleans. Songbook is taken from those Joe’s Pub shows; an intimate, warm set of songs written by Toussaint that were made popular by other artists.

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Music Review: Tom McDermott, Bamboula

By Melissa Bratcher

The veritable Van Dyke Parks has curated a collection culled from New Orleans-based piano god Tom McDermott’s previous albums. Bamboula is pure sonic pleasure from the first note.

Parks elaborates on just what makes McDermott’s playing and composing so astonishing: “As a composer, Tom’s compositions each read like a good short story, filled with motifs, anecdotes, and suspended sub-plots that all resolve in conclusion.” As I listened to Bamboula, I was struck by the visual nature of Tom McDermott’s music. Each song became the music for a movie I wanted to see or possibly be in, richly layered and fascinating. It’s transporting in a way that you long for music to be.

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Music Review: Various Artists, The Exquisite Corpse Game

By Less Lee Moore

I first head the term “Exquisite Corpse” in the Bauhaus song of the same name, but I didn’t know what it meant or about its history. Popularized by the Surrealists, it is “a method by which a collection of words or images is collectively assembled. Each collaborator adds to a composition in sequence, either by following a rule or by being allowed to see only the end of what the previous person contributed” (Wikipedia).

This method seems perfect for a variety of artistic collaborations, particularly music, where it can be utilized to create a textured mixtape quality. Musician Kavus Torabi decided to embark on an exquisite corpse project through his own label, Believers Roast, and the results—two years in the making—are remarkable and intoxicating. Each artist was only allowed to hear the final 20 seconds of the previous installment and was not allowed to hear the entire collection until it was completed.

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Music Review: Ha Ha Tonka, Lessons

By Melissa Bratcher

The delightfully named Ha Ha Tonka (named after a gorgeous state park in Missouri, replete with a crumbling mansion/hotel) are clearly at a crossroads. Their latest effort, Lessons, is a departure from their previous more stripped-down records, and is chock full of soul-searching, thinky lyrics. I’m not sure the change in direction was a good move.

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Music Review: Kenny Feinstein, Loveless: Hurts To Love

By Jemiah Jefferson

It became a cliché, nearly a joke, the reverence that rock critics had for My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless album, a singular document of noisy, sexy, melodic weirdness that loomed large in reputation for the 20-plus years since its release. This year has seen several tribute albums to it, somehow all of them excellent, but this latest from Portland-based Kenny Feinstein wins additional points for freshness, sincerity, and an obsessive attention to detail that would undoubtedly please the notoriously perfectionist MBV frontman, Kevin Shields.

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Various Artists, ZZK Sound Volume 3

By Chelsea Spear

When I got a copy of ZZK Sound to review, I felt pulled in opposite directions. Many of the Latin alternative blogs and podcasts from which I get the latest music news cite the Argentine label ZZK Records as an innovative new label that marries the traditional folk idiom cumbia to more contemporary forms of music, particularly EDM. ZZK’s adventurous perspective piqued my interest, but their concentration in dance music gave me pause. I don’t go to the clubs enough to hear dance music the way it was meant to be heard, and if you asked me to tell you what EDM sounded like, I’d throw out the following words: amelodic, beat-heavy, high-endy, compressed production, “bricked” sound.

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Music Review: Holograms, Forever

By Less Lee Moore

The first time I heard Holograms’ second album Forever, I got goosebumps. It was like being transported back to 1985, listening to college radio late at night, rushing to press the RECORD button on my stereo, waiting for the DJ to reveal the name of the band. But Holograms is not a post-punk ripoff.

The album takes off like a rocket with “Sacred State”: booming drums, bass dancing around the jagged guitar edges, and enormous vocals from singer Andreas Lagerström. The frenetic energy is undeniable. It’s tempered only slightly by a instrumental bridge towards the end that prepares you for a melodic assault of guitar slowly building to an intense emotional peak before the vocalized chorus joins in again. And that’s just the first song.

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Music Review: Glen Campbell, See You There

By Melissa Bratcher

There’s debate on the Internets regarding whether releasing Glen Campbell’s See You There is exploitative. Campbell is suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, and some say this album—stripped down versions of his greatest hits—is just an attempt to cash in. I disagree, utterly. See You There is touching and triumphant—and painful to hear, but in a good way.

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Music Review: San Fermin, San Fermin

By Melissa Bratcher

San Fermin‘s self-titled debut is wildly ambitious. Full of songs that are like journeys, but journeys that end up in an entirely different place than you thought you might go, it’s a challenging, interesting listen. San Fermin is the brainchild of Yale-educated composer Ellis Ludwig-Leone, and he is ably backed by vocalists Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig (of Lucius) and Allen Tate.

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