// Category Archive for: Music

Iceage, New Brigade

By Less Lee Moore

Iceage is the kind of band that music critics slobber all over (and if you read music blogs, you’ll have heard about them already). This probably sounds like I’m insulting Iceage and music critics in one hastily written sentence, but be patient with me; I had to put that out there to get it out of the way.

Hearing “White Rune” for the first time was invigorating, to say the least. And to be fair to music critics, in part because I am one, there’s an awful lot of crappy music out there, so any hint of potential non-crap is pretty damn exciting to us.

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Wild Beasts, Smother

By Ann Clarke

I was quite fond of last year’s release by Wild Beasts—Two Dancers—so I was quite surprised that they had a brand new album out so quickly thereafter. So does Smother hold up to its predecessor? The short response is: Yes, it does!
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Chris Difford, Cashmere If You Can

By Kai Shuart

This outing from the former Squeeze member finds him in a very reflective mode .The opening song, “1975,” could be taken as a collection of incidents from various periods of the protagonist’s life. This feeling of a walk down Memory Lane is bolstered by the second song, “Back in the Day,” whose protagonist recounts a misspent youth of getting into trouble and hanging with a rough crowd, not sparing unflattering details such as mugging the elderly and accidentally urinating in bed.
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Elysian Fields, Last Night On Earth

By J Howell

Jennifer Charles made me a fan the first time I heard “Mr. Cardiac,” a song she sang on the first Firewater record, Get Off The Cross, We Need The Wood For The Fire.

Charles’ breathy, sultry singing paired with Tod Ashley’s brilliant, incisive lyrics was one of many high points on that record, and I had to hear more. A couple of years later, I found an EP of her band, Elysian Fields, a collaboration with Oren Bloedow and a revolving cast of Downtown New York luminaries, including Marc Ribot.
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Sea Of Bees, Songs For The Ravens

By J Howell

I became instantly curious about Julie Baenziger’s Sea of Bees a couple of months ago, after seeing a half-page ad for Songs For The Ravens in every audio geek’s bimonthly bible, Tape Op magazine. Being an almost-obsessive Sparklehorse fan, I knew any band compared to Sparklehorse would quickly make the top of my must-check-out list. After reading a bit about Sea of Bees and checking out a YouTube clip of “Skinnybone,” I had to hear more.

As it turns out, there’s more of a connection between Tape Op and Sea of Bees than an ad.
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Flogging Molly, Speed Of Darkness

By Magda Underdown-DuBois

Speed of Darkness, the fifth album by Flogging Molly comes in low, Perfect Circle-style, for a full 30 seconds and then crashes into one’s ears like a comet of sound.

Full of working contradiction, the band is a proud member of the new Celtic rock music generation along with The Pogues or The Secret Commonwealth. From their own record label Borstal Beat, Speed of Darkness is a self-professed concept album in an age of MP3s and singles, with the pounding rhythm of punk, but the articulated lyrical message of traditional Irish music.
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Fantastic Planet: La Planète Sauvage

By Less Lee Moore

Like Rock & Rule , Fantastic Planet (1973) was an outstanding animated film introduced to me by USA’s Night Flight. For those who do not recognize this film by its English or French name (La Planète Sauvage), certainly you have seen images from it over the years; they aren’t ones you can easily forget.

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A Brief History Of Black Sci-Fi Music

By Jemiah Jefferson

The earliest and greatest of them all was jazz bandleader Sun Ra. Best known these days for the extremely strange movie Space is the Place, released in 1974, a unique combination of concert film, parable, “blaxploitation,” and a lot of other just plain confusing stuff.
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Ground Control To Major Stardust: Ziggy’s Tale

By Christian Lipski

“I’m just a space cadet. He’s the commander.”
—Bowie fan, 1973

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Tindersticks, Claire Denis Film Scores 1996 – 2009

By Michelle Patterson

How I judge whether or not a soundtrack feels organic to its cinematic equal is whether or not it can stand on its own. This does not determine whether or not it is good—the apparent strength of the music isn’t a question—but if it can genuinely remind me of the film when I am listening to it in the quiet of my own bedroom or on the chaotic bus to work.

The clearest role of the soundtracks as experienced in the Tindersticks‘ Claire Denis Film Scores box set is as passive listener. This music stands on its own, without its marriage to the visuals; better yet, it imports another sense of value when associated with an entirely new set of identifiers, all depending on the situation of the listener.
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