Best Of 2012: Chelsea Spear

Say you’re a rock critic and the calendar has dwindled to a single page. You’re expected to write a year-in-review column, but your artistic heroes have disappointed you and none of the year’s new releases have galvanized you the way you’d hoped. What do you do? You reach into your back pages to look at some forgotten favorites and things that got away from you the first time around. In writing about these forgotten favorites, maybe you can introduce your readers to something new as well.

(more…)

Bird In Flight: Theresa Andersson

By Chelsea Spear

TT The Bears, Cambridge MA
June 17, 2012

It’s no surprise that Theresa Andersson is drawn to aviary lyrical imagery. Live, the singer/songwriter cuts a figure like the birds she evokes on her breakthrough album Hummingbird, Go! A flurry of activity, she plays several instruments and loops her vocals, arrangements, and samples before a live audience, swirling about like a blur in a diaphanous bat-wing blouse.

The thrush had come north to TT The Bears, a careworn bar tucked away on a side street in Cambridge, on a tour to support her latest album, Street Parade. This show marked her first live performance in our fair city, and her hour-long set served as an introduction to both her music and her unorthodox live show.
(more…)

Theresa Andersson, Street Parade

By Chelsea Spear

Theresa Andersson’s 2008 breakthrough album Hummingbird, Go! was no small accomplishment. Serving as a one-woman band, Andersson spun hummable, soulful tunes brimming with hard-won optimism. The straightforward production and elaborate arrangements became even more impressive once listeners knew that she’d performed all the instruments herself, using effects pedals to create loops. (The video for her song “Na Na Na,” in which she demonstrates her one-woman band setup, attracted 1.2 million views on YouTube.) How do you top a left-field critical and artistic success like this?
(more…)