// Category Archive for: Music Reviews

The Autumn Defense, Once Around

By Less Lee Moore

Wilco fans have known about The Autumn Defense, a side project featuring Patrick Sansone and John Stirratt, for years. For the rest of us, their latest album Once Around is both a surprise and a pleasure.
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Sarah Kirkland Snider, Penelope

By Chelsea Spear

Photo © Murat Eyuboglu

Monday morning, 10 a.m. The sixth floor of the UMass Boston Healey Library, overlooking Boston Harbor. I have been working on this goddamned paper about Marc Hirsch and Billy Collins and the role of the audience in poetry for two weeks now. The words on the page have calcified into incoherence, but I still feel the pressure of academia goading me towards a conclusion that wraps my argument into a tidy bow.

My eyes shift from the eyestrain-inducing computer screen to a small rowboat in the Harbor, by the Corita Kent gas tanks. A tiny woman, clad in an elegant grey wool coat with the shiniest brass buttons, stands at the hull of the boat, lifting her arms to the overcast sky in a dramatic gesture. I can hear her voice—a high soprano, rich in tone and trembling with vibrato—perfectly.
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Weep, Worn Thin

By Less Lee Moore

You may have thought that Weep was just a one hit wonder.

You were wrong.

Worn Thin is the new album from the band and it’s wonderful.
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Erland & The Carnival, Trouble In Mind EP

By Less Lee Moore

If you didn’t know better, you might think that Trouble In Mind, the new EP from British folk band Erland & The Carnival, was recorded sometime in the mid-to-late-sixties and just unearthed last week.

Interestingly, the title track is the most modern-sounding song on the EP, with its gentle, yet catchy, vocals and harpsichord.

After the opening of “My Name Is Carnival,” which recalls the intro to Cream’s “White Room,” the rolling drumbeat, tremolo guitars, spacey keyboards, and striking harmonies conspire to transport the listener into the past, perhaps a concert scene from a documentary about British folk rock or Haight-Ashbury.
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The Black Heart Procession, Blood Bunny/Black Rabbit

By J Howell

Throughout the eight tracks on Blood Bunny/Black Rabbit, the new mini-album from San Diego’s always-intriguing The Black Heart Procession, there’s plenty of what fans love about the band: their noir feel is present in spades. Overall, though, while Blood Bunny/Black Rabbit is an enjoyable record, as a whole it feels a little like what it is, I suppose: a short work between larger, more cohesive artistic statements.

BHP mainstays Pall Jenkins and Tobias Nathaniel have always produced impressive work, and over six albums the band has carved its own dark, beautiful, and often sexy niche in modern music. While this record is quite good, it doesn’t expand much on that remarkable body of work.
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The Legendary Pink Dots, Seconds Late For The Brighton Line

By Hanna

Seconds Late For The Brighton Line is called the Legendary Pink Dots‘ 30th anniversary album, and while I can’t find anything specifically 30th anniversary about it, it does fit that title to some extent.

The album is not an overview of all their styles; in fact, it has a rather specific style, especially for an LPD album, but in other ways, it is extremely typical and in some ways, familiar. This is helped by the the fact that several of the songs were premiered during the band’s 30th anniversary tour. “Hauptbahnhof 20:10” and “Russian Roulette” were both very impressive live, and do not sound much different on the album.
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Kristian Hoffman, Fop

By Hanna and Matt Keeley

Kristian Hoffman is perhaps best known for working with the brilliant Klaus Nomi; he was Nomi’s musical director and the wordsmith behind Nomi’s original songs. If you’ve sat down with the records, you know how good those songs were and still are, both in performance (there’s a reason Nomi’s one of Rush Limbaugh’s favorites) and in songwriting. Nomi should have conquered the world; instead, he died too early.

Hoffman, on the other hand, didn’t sleep, and has been working with loads of cool people, including James White and the Contortions, Rufus Wainwright, Sparks, Lydia Lunch and. . . look, this’ll just be a laundry list of who’s who in good music, so just rest assured: if they’re talented, he’s probably worked with ’em. He’s also done solo records, of which Fop is the newest. It’s such an event that Popshifter enlisted TWO, count ’em TWO, reviewers to cover it.
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Stan Ridgway, Neon Mirage

By Matt Keeley

I’ve been a fan of Stan Ridgway for a while—I even like The Way I Feel Today, his Standards album, and I’m one of those people who typically feels that if your name’s not “Harry Nilsson,” you shouldn’t be a pop singer who makes a Standards record. Of course, it helped that Ridgway experimented with the arrangements and song choices (he turned me on to “The Coffee Song,” one you’ve undoubtedly heard but probably can’t think of immediately), rather than just plopping down in front of an orchestra and phoning one in.
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Electric Six, Zodiac

By Less Lee Moore

Since it continues the mythology of the band—self-perpetuation through self-aggrandizing self-deprecation—there’s likely no more appropriate title for the new Electric Six album than Zodiac.

Zodiac is more ambitious than any E6 release since I Shall Exterminate. . ., more structured than Flashy yet more ridiculous than Kill.
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Buke And Gass, Riposte

By Jimmy Ether

In the few short weeks that I’ve been aware of Buke and Gass, I have become their biggest fan. Seriously. I’ll fight you for that bragging right! Let’s go!

Aron Sanchez and Arone Dyer create a sound—simultaneously backwoods and urbane—which fans some deep, primordial fire in my chest. They are positively . . . explosive. And they make me feel explosive.
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