// Category Archive for: Music Reviews

The Heartless Bastards, Arrow

By Danny R. Phillips

The Heartless Bastards are a bit of an anomaly in the world of music. They are a rock band led by the charismatic and clever Miss Erika Wennerstrom. Instead of taking the manufactured pop road much traveled like Katy, Britney, or Lana, Wennerstrom charges ahead like Chrissie Hynde, strapping on a guitar and scorching the Earth.

Arrow, the Bastards fifth album and first for Paristian Records, is full of exceptional lyrics, 1970s rock stomp, and just a sprinkling of country twang. Where 2009’s The Mountain (my pick for album of the year) was full of heartbreak and cathartic reflection (Wennerstrom had ended a nine-year relationship), Arrow is packed with wonder and acceptance of life.
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New Artist: Kris Korey

By Kai Shuart

Kris Korey’s interest in music—and making music—began at an early age; he wrote his first song at age seven. He started playing drums in his high school music class and soon branched out into playing with other local bands, touring around Ontario until 2006. From there, Kris picked up the electric guitar and started writing songs, taking voice lessons, and even recorded some home demos on an 8-track. In 2010, Kris recorded a couple of songs with Canadian producer Chris Perry which he intends to release on a full-length release titled Class Act.
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Pan Am: Music From And Inspired By The Original Series

By Melissa Bratcher

I love a good soundtrack, even for things I’ve not seen. I love the way that carefully chosen songs can convey a feeling and even a look, and that the use of music in a show or movie can make or destroy a moment.

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Various Artists, Meet Me At Mardi Gras

By Melissa B.

How fortunate the New Orleanians are: Once Christmas and New Year’s are over, they get to move straight into Carnival season. Parades, food, music, revelry, and the finest of these things, I’d wager, is the music.

I’ve often wondered how New Orleans can have so many obscenely talented, homegrown musicians. Is it the food, the humidity, the heritage, the proximity to water? Is there a great funk reservoir that all of the drinking water comes from? Do they put it in babies’ bottles at birth? Whatever causes it, there is a bumper crop of amazing New Orleans music out there and Meet Me At Mardi Gras puts it all in one convenient disc, making a party in your living room, or car, or ears. What have you.

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Melody Walker, Gold Rush Goddess

By Kai Shuart

In the interest of full journalistic disclosure, I have to say that I know Melody Walker—the artist behind this CD—personally; I had the privilege of playing with her many times when we were both attending Humboldt State University and seeing her talent grow from her early days playing at Muddy Waters. We remain great friends to this day.

However, that does not diminish the fact that this is an outstanding record. The opening title track, “Gold Rush Goddess” intertwines the earthy images of dynamited mountains and the lusty image of a woman dancing for money and melds them into a cohesive allegory for exploitation, as evidenced in the lyric “Come down off that mountain/come down all you men/but don’t you come knockin’ without money in your hand.”
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The Fall, Ersatz G.B.

By J Howell

To trot out, once again, the nearing-cliche bit about The Fall said by the late John Peel, “they are always the same; they are always different.” Simple wisdom from Peel regarding the Fall, and always applicable: Ersatz G.B. is no different in that regard. Whether that’s a good thing or not is entirely up to the listener.
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Peggy Sue, Acrobats

By J Howell

The concept of the “sophomore slump” may be a tired old critical cliché, but it’s applicable often enough that when a band with a great debut gets around to that second record, one may find oneself a bit nervous. Thankfully, Peggy Sue—whose Fossils and Other Phantoms was likely the best debut album of last year—have not only avoided the second record hex, they’ve completely obliterated it. It’s difficult to recall another sophomore effort that so masterfully retained the best of its creators’ aesthetic while expounding upon it by orders of magnitude; the example that springs to mind is Castanets’ First Light’s Freeze, and like that record, Acrobats may well stand as a modern classic.
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Thomas Dolby, A Map Of The Floating City

By Jemiah Jefferson

It’s somewhat startling to realize that this is Thomas Dolby’s first album in twenty years. Since the 1992 non-success of Astronauts & Heretics, his last album of originals, Dolby busied himself in Silicon Valley, inventing and patenting applications involved in ring tone technology. This is the sort of thing that the cerebral, nay—pointy-headed—Dolby would do when the music industry started to bore him. But what happened after the man created his patents, got rich, got bored (again), and went home?

Once a musician, always a musician. Dolby began touring again, solo, several years ago, and to his audiences, dropped teasing hints that he was working on new music. A Map of the Floating City, in all its forms, is the result of that lengthy process, revealing painstaking perfectionism that occasionally gets in the way, but mostly creates a multilayered experience that develops in complexity with every revisit.
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The Smile Sessions

By Paul Casey

As Paul Williams said in 1997—prematurely as it turns out—upon the release of 30 minutes of the SMiLE music on the Good Vibrations box set, SMiLE is Done. The release of The Smile Sessions by EMI and Capitol Records on November 1, 2011, is the end of a long strange journey. You can read my thoughts on the phenomenon of SMiLE in my other article, but this one is purely about the music.

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The Explorers Club, The Carolinian Suite EP

By Cait Brennan

The Grand Hotel is still under construction . . . but your complimentary suite is ready.

It’s been three years since Charleston, South Carolina’s pop revivalists The Explorers Club released Freedom Wind, a peach of a debut record that sounded for all the world like a Great Lost Beach Boys masterpiece. I’ll never forget the first time I heard that album’s “Last Kiss”—speeding down the 101 through Hollywood, right as the Capitol Records tower came into full view, all sunshine and blue skies and ocean breezes. The perfect soundtrack to a perfect day. Somewhere, Brian Wilson was smiling.
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