// Category Archive for: Music Reviews

Music Review: IO Echo, Ministry Of Love

By Less Lee Moore

There are albums so good, the task of describing them seems overwhelming. Yet the glorious challenge of explaining why the songs are amazing can be a real honor, especially if even one person reads my paltry words, buys the album, and is thus transported.

So it is with Ministry of Love, the debut album from the duo of Ioanna Gika and Leopold Ross, who form IO Echo. They marry the proto-goth of early Cure and Siouxsie with the lushness of Cocteau Twins and School of Seven Bells in songs informed by the subtle yet strong undercurrents of Asian sonics. Despite what my descriptions might imply, Ministry of Love isn’t bleak. The euphoric pop of songs like the title track and “Ecstasy Ghost” ensure that the album never feels morose, although it skirts the edges of unsettling.

(more…)

Music Review: Lynsey de Paul, Sugar And Beyond/Into My Music Anthologies

By Hanna

The entire ‘70s catalogue of pioneering female singer/songwriter Lynsey de Paul has finally been collected in two new anthologies: Sugar and Beyond 1972 – 1974 and Into My Music 1975 – 1979. Using exclusive material and information from Lynsey de Paul herself, this is a unique collection, signifying a new chance to discover her work and to grant it the recognition it deserves.

(more…)

Music Review: Todd Rundgren, State

By Jeffery X Martin

Todd Rundgren has been making music since before most of us were born. His first solo album came out in 1969. He was huge during the early Seventies, riding the wave of his radio hit “Hello, It’s Me.” He resurged during the early Eighties as not only a musician, but as a video software pioneer. The video for “Time Heals” was everywhere back then. He resurged again in the Nineties, re-inventing himself as the first interactive musician, inviting folks to remix his tracks and play his music with him in his interactive music pod at PepsiStock ’94.

Then he started recording Samba versions of his old songs. This seemed to be a lateral move.

(more…)

Music Review: Johnny Marr, The Messenger

By Cait Brennan

“Hear me, the wonder of it,” Johnny Marr sings on “The Right Thing Right,” the opening track of his new solo album The Messenger. Marr essentially invented ’80s Britpop with The Smiths, a band whose hallmarks featured Marr’s blazing melodic runs and (oh god let’s just get it over with) jangling guitars, serving as the perfect counterpoint to those literate, mannered, melancholic lyrics from an obscure vocalist whose name time has sadly forgotten.

In the intervening years, as The Smiths’ influence has grown to legend, countless guitarists have reproduced that iconic sound with near-religious devotion. Everybody, it seems, but Marr himself, who often seemingly took pains to play like somebody, anybody other than that guy on The Smiths records. While Morrissey rose to new heights as a writ-large, Nicholas Ray CinemaScope version of himself, Marr left it all behind, blazing an exhaustive, exhausting trail through new sounds and new identities that would wear out Richard Kimble.

(more…)

Music Review: Gene Clark, Here Tonight: The White Light Demos

By Cait Brennan

The experience of being alive is joyous and unbearable. This crude matter we’re made of fights us every step of the way, but something deeper, something more, some beauty and energy blasting through from a source we can’t know animates us, fills us, drives us onward, and the friction, the vibration of energy that moves us, is what we call music. Where does it go, do you suppose, when we’re gone? Nobody knows, but you’ve gotta hope that when the radio breaks, still the signal shines on.

If rock and roll means anything worth caring about, it’s the need to express something real and beautiful and transcendent from the human soul. But that need can lead to soul-destroying results. There’s a fake thing called fame today, but it’s nothing like the sun that blistered down on the rock and roll bands of the 1960s. Know-nothing hambones like Mike Love get out in front and let their egos feast on the callow roar and toxic adulation of the crowd while sucking the lifeblood out of the delicate creative genius that brought them to the party, like a fat tick on a sick dog. The songwriter gets in the way? Kick ’em out of the band and keep the carnival on the road. Don’t mess with the formula, right?

Which brings us to the Byrds’ creative genius, Gene Clark. A down-to-earth, folk-influenced kid from the Midwest, he co-founded the band, and (excepting a few covers written by some stray named Robert Zimmerman) was the songwriting powerhouse behind the Byrds’ golden age. Just a few of the highlights he wrote or co-wrote: “I’ll Feel A Whole Lot Better,” “She Don’t Care About Time,” “I’m Feelin’ Higher,” “If You’re Gone,” “Here Without You,” “The World Turns All Around Her,” “Set You Free This Time,” oh, and a little number called “Eight Miles High.”

(more…)

Music Review: Atoms For Peace, Amok

By J Howell

One of the most difficult considerations in music criticism lies in following an artist’s career for the long haul and remaining objective enough about said artist’s work to give it a fair shake. This notion really hit home for me in a major way recently while listening to and thinking about the most recent Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds record. Push The Sky Away is a record I came to fully appreciate only after at least a dozen spins—long enough to finally let go of some of my expectations from Cave and the Seeds and just listen (review).

That’s kind of the bitch of following a body of work enthusiastically over years (or decades). Avoiding becoming jaded is a subject far beyond the scope of this review, but even if it seems obvious, it’s worth noting that after a certain point, it’s hard to get the same life-altering feeling you got when you heard “Tupelo” or “Taut” or Bone Machine or Doolittle (wait—scratch that, I still get that teenage feeling listening to Doolittle) or “Paranoid Android” for the first time.

What we get in return for following where people like Cave or Polly Harvey or Thom Yorke—with Atoms For Peace’s Amok—lead may not always be that immediate, profound experience of hearing something important for the first time. When you’re lucky, though, the sense of growing and changing, maybe even maturing (it’s okay to wince; I did typing) alongside such artists, finding their work still (and sometimes strangely) relevant to where you find yourself right now, can be just as rewarding.

(more…)

Music Review: Wendy & Lisa, Wendy and Lisa

By Paul Casey

Wendy & Lisa have put out five albums and one EP of original material during the years they have worked as a duo. For such a talented pair this does not seem like nearly enough. The benefit of having so few albums is, however, there is no off period. Their debut, Wendy and Lisa, came out in 1987 and started a (short) string of great albums. It is a classic of the 1980s, and unavoidably a document of what Prince lost when he fired Wendy, Lisa, and Bobby Z. (who co-produces the album).

(more…)

Music Review: Old Man Markley, Down Side Up

By Paul Casey

Old Man Markley’s second album, Down Side Up, is certainly more Bluegrass than Punk. The tempo is up there but the vocal approach is quite apart from, say, The Dropkick Murphys’ mixture of traditional and hard rock influences, or indeed Shane MacGowan’s Johnny Rotten sneer pushed through the balladry of Luke Kelly. While their first album Guts n’ Teeth does have some of the growl and shout and knock back pirate chant quality to it, there are more similarities with how The Decemberists or Okkervil River approach Traditional music. Even when the lyrics get colorful and the band gets fired up, the vocals remain gently emotive. Even live, they retain much of this quality. From viewing footage of their live act, it is clear that they are a tight outfit. As a delicious stew of influences, they recall the flavor of Hot Buttered Rum.

(more…)

Music Review: Shooter Jennings, The Other Life

By Emily Carney

As I sit in my apartment on a quiet Sunday morning, the Tampa Bay area is still reeling from the effects of a Kenny Chesney concert. It even merited an article in our local paper, the Tampa Bay Times. While I’m glad these fans raised a bit of G-rated hell and enjoyed some country music, some of us enjoy the grittier sounds of the son of one of the canon’s finest, Shooter Jennings. On his new release The Other Life, Waylon’s son proves himself to be worthy of his dad’s crown.

(more…)

Music Review: Suede, Bloodsports

By Less Lee Moore

Is it bird song?
Or is it just the car alarms
Making us feel so young?
Savage like the dawn.
—Suede, “Fault Lines”

My love for Suede stretches back to the summer of 1993, when I first saw the videos for “Metal Mickey” and “The Drowners.” Suede looked, sounded, felt like a band you could fall in love with. I was fortunate enough to see them live in New Orleans in October 1993. After that, my fandom was eternal.

(more…)