Trembling Bells -- Carbeth
Alright, no one but me is paying attention to this Glasgow music, but it just keeps coming, and it's remarkable.Today's installment: Carbeth, by Glasgow's Trembling Bells. There are elements here that will delight fans of early Fairport Convention's trad rock (count me as one of them) and Devendra Banhart's twisted psychedelic folk (not so much a fan, although I do hear moments of ethereal, weird beauty). More importantly, lead songwriter Alex Neilson has worked with Scots trad troubadour Alasdair Roberts and indie folk hero Bonnie Prince Billy, and he's learned his lessons well, one of them being to find a... read more
Great Scots
Forget Portland and forget Brooklyn. The best pop music in the world right now is coming out of Glasgow and Edinburgh, Scotland. Here are two more pieces of evidence.We Were Promised Jetpacks - These Four WallsIt's the 21st century now, dammit. Just where are those jetpacks?Aside from being bent out of shape about the unfulfilled promise of the technological age, Glasgow quartet We Were Promised Jetpacks are exorcised about just about everything else as well. This is the angst-ridden, anthemic side of Glasgow music (think Frightened Rabbit and The Twilight Sad, as opposed to the angst-ridden, non-anthemic music of Belle... read more
The Halfway Point
Not content with year-end lists, many music critics now offer their thoughts at the halfway point. Here are mine. For what it's worth, I think 2009 has been a fabulous musical year, with quality and innovation bursting forth in every genre. In typical fashion, my list is all over the place. That's because I like music, all kinds of music, and I see no reason to compartmentalize my listening habits.My #1 album isn't out until August 18th. Sorry about that. It just happens to be the best album I've heard so far this year. When it comes out, you should... read more
No Through Road/Two Cow Garage
The albums come in never-ending waves. They blur together. Sometimes they stand out. And when they do, I try to tell you about them. Here are two that have stood out in the past couple weeks.No Through Road -- Winner.Yes, the period is part of the title. Thank you, TV on the Radio and latest album Dear Science,. Punctuation is your friend.......No Through Road hail from Adelaide, Australia, where apparently the music world is stuck in a 2002 timewarp, and where all the cool kids are listening to Interpol and The Strokes. That's okay. I like Interpol and The Strokes,... read more
Chuck Berry
It's all rather passe these days to praise the work of '50s rock 'n roll icons. The 50th anniversary of Buddy Holly's death merited some attention earlier this winter, and Elvis remains a perennial subject of derision and awe, but for the most part the first generation of rock 'n rollers is seen as a quaint reminder of a bygone era, as contemporary as a trip to the drug store soda fountain for a chocolate malt.And so it was with some surprise that my recent re-exploration of the music of Chuck Berry revealed an artist who still sounds supremely relevant.... read more
The Rural Alberta Advantage -- Hometowns
I've never been to Alberta, and I've certainly never been to rural Alberta, which I suppose is pretty much the whole province outside of Calgary and Edmonton. I'm not sure why it would be advantageous to hail from there. More moose sightings, perhaps. But Hometowns, the debut album from The Rural Alberta Advantage, a trio of non-antlered bi-peds who have now migrated to Toronto, makes the case that the windswept prairies are a prime impetus behind their creativity.Here's the good news and the bad news: Hometowns sounds remarkably like Neutral Milk Hotel. That means you get the kind of furious,... read more
The Receiver -- Length of Arms
The influence of Radiohead is incalculable, and every week I encounter at least one new release that is deeply indebted to Thom Yorke and company. So let's get it out of the way up front. Columbus, Ohio duo The Receiver -- brothers Casey and Jesse Cooper -- have clearly been influenced by Radiohead. Casey's breathy vocals are a dead ringer for Yorke's, and the layered keyboards/synths and skittery rhythms bear the unmistakable imprint of a couple guys who have spent a lot of time listening to Kid A. ... read more
Blackberry Smoke -- Little Piece of Dixie
The ghost of Ronnie Van Zant must be smiling.Blackberry Smoke are four righteous southern rockers who wear the uniform with panache; hair down to the middle of their backs, beards down to the middle of their chests, bandannas firmly in place. They've been genetically programmed to carry on the proud good ol' boy tradition and fast-frozen since 1976. Recently thawed, they've unleashed their second album Little Piece of Dixie upon an unsuspecting public that has forgotten the dubious appeal of pickup trucks, coon dogs, rednecks and longnecks, and the sweet charms of the little missus.This is admittedly not my favorite... read more
Paul Potts -- Passione
Before there was Susan Boyle, there was Paul Potts, astounding the world as a chubby little cell phone salesman who could sing opera. Imagine. Fat people could sing. Even on TV.So there's Paul, on the cover of his second album Passione, which I'm going to take a wild guess is Italian for "passion," looking broodingly out over Venice's Grand Canal. If you had translated Roberta Flack's "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" into Italian, and actually had the audacity to call it "La Prima Volta," you might brood, too. Here's the deal: Italian is cool, and makes people... read more
Bob Dylan, the Lazy Rhyme, and the Sublime
For the past seven hundred years, poets have been rhyming love with dove, moon with June, girl with curl, and boy with joy. Certain rhymes are so convenient and appropriate that their use had already become stale by the mid 1700s.-- Stephen Fry, from The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet WithinThat big fat moon is gonna shine like a spoonWe’re gonna let it-- Bob Dylan, Poet of a Generation, “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” ... read more
Look Ma, No Genre Boundaries Roundup -- Boston Spaceships, Antje Duvekot, Shane Dwight Blues Band, Black Joe Lewis and the Honeybears
Five new worthy efforts for your listening pleasure. Boston Spaceships -- Planets Are BlastedDamn you, Bob Pollard. Pollard seemingly releases a new Robert Pollard/Cosmos/Boston Spaceships album every two weeks or so, and if I have to grudgingly admit that he's put out about three great albums since the demise of Guided By Voices, I'll still maintain that those three great albums are spread out over twenty official releases. So just when I'm ready to write him off, he releases another jaw-droppingly wondrous mashup of British Invasion jangle and lyrical non-sequiturs. Last year's Brown Submarine served notice that Pollard had... read more
A Short, Reductionist Kiwi Pop Primer
There was something magical going on long before Peter Jackson transformed the rugged wilderness of New Zealand into Middle Earth. In the early 1980s, Dunedin music impresario Roger Shepherd founded Flying Nun Records. The rest is history, although it's history that is surprisingly little known in the U.S. Perhaps it's time to change that. Because from the mid '80s through the early '90s, Flying Nun Records put out the best music on the planet. And yes, I'm looking at you, Kurt Cobain and Eddie Vedder.As with any "sound" associated with a city (Seattle, Athens, Austin), there is far more variety... read more
The Circumlocution Office
Because the Circumlocution Office went on mechanically, every day, keeping this wonderful, all-sufficient wheel of statesmanship, How not to do it, in motion. Because the Circumlocution Office was down upon any ill-advised public servant who was going to do it, or who appeared to be by any surprising accident in remote danger of doing it, with a minute, and a memorandum, and a letter of instructions that extinguished him. It was this spirit of national efficiency in the Circumlocution Office that had gradually led to its having something to do with everything. Mechanicians, natural philosophers, soldiers, sailors, petitioners, memorialists, people... read more
Alt-Country Roundup: The Believers, The Von Ehrics, Jason Heath and the Greedy Souls
Alt-country music arguably peaked in 1995, with the formation of Whiskeytown, The Jayhawks' Tomorrow the Green Grass, Emmylou Harris' Wrecking Ball, Old 97's Wreck Your Life, Steve Earle's Train a Comin', and the releases of the debut Wilco, Son Volt, and Buddy Miller albums. Don't look now, but that was almost a decade and a half ago. In the meantime, the genre, which once seemed to breathe fresh, new life into hoary country music, has gotten a little long in the tooth. Tastes have changed, and the audience, for the most part, has moved on. That's most evident in the... read more
Cat Power (No, Not Her)
Steven Demitre Georgiou is an almost forgotten man these days, even when he goes by his much more famous musical pseudonym Cat Stevens. For a while there in the 1970s he was one of the biggest pop stars in the world, and he released two unquestioned masterpieces in Tea for the Tillerman and Teaser and the Firecat. But even on those unmistakeable triumphs there were signs of the discontent and restlessness that made him abandon music entirely at the end of the decade. Cat Stevens, perhaps more than any other pop star, was a spiritual seeker. He saw through the... read more
Willie Nile -- House of a Thousand Guitars
Willie Nile doesn't make indie rock, psychedelic rock, or alt-anything. He makes blue collar rock 'n roll, the kind that used to emerge out of basement windows and garages a long time ago. It's all filtered through a late '70s/early '80s pop sheen, and it forever dooms him to the second tier of rock artists. He's more Eddie Money than Bruce Springsteen (come to think of it, Bruce Springsteen is more Eddie Money than Bruce Springsteen these days). But when he's on, and he's on about half the time on his new album House of a Thousand Guitars, he... read more
Trifecta Perfecta -- Justin Townes Earle, Gretel, Will Gray
It was one of the strangest triple bills I've ever encountered -- country traditionalist Justin Townes Earle, indie-folk stalwarts Gretel, and hip-hop/roots artist Will Gray. Imagine Hank Williams hanging out with Leslie Feist hanging out with ?uestlove and The Roots and you're in the ballpark. Or, in this case, the bar; specifically, Cafe Rumba in the north campus neighborhood. Nashville, Boston, and L.A. came to Columbus. It was an unprecedented geographic and stylistic mashup, and it was was an astonishingly redemptive, soulful batch of fun. ... read more
Benjy Ferree: Come Back to the Five and Dime, Bobby Dee, Bobby Dee
Here's a recipe for commercial suicide: write a concept album about an obscure-Disney-child-star-turned-adult-homeless-addict, sprinkle in liberal doses of surrealistic imagery, and toss in a variety of musical influences, from the strutting glam rock of T. Rex to the multi-tracked vocal bombast of Freddie Mercury to the raw country blues of Son House. That's what D.C. singer/songwriter Benjy Ferree does on his sophomore album Come Back to the Five and Dime, Bobby Dee, Bobby Dee. Naturally, no one will know what to do with this hopelessly convoluted mash-up. Naturally, it's a pretty great album.... read more
Artist Most in Need of an Editor/Sane Voice of Reason to Say "Ack! That's a Horrible Idea" and "No, No, You Need to Pare It Way, Way Back"
The candidates are:1) Ryan Adams2) Robert Pollard3) Bill Mallonee4) Bruce Springsteen (kidding; but less so the last time out)And the winner/loser is ... Robert Pollard.I have varying degrees of respect for all the candidates, and downright love and affection for the last three. Still, the former Guided By Voices frontman is the easy winner here, primarily because his three going concerns (Boston Spaceships, Circus Devils, and solo Bob) churn out new albums on the order of one per month, and because every one of them has a couple inspired moments surrounded by utterly mind-numbing, pointless lyrical and musical swill.... read more
Most Disappointing Albums
I've been forcing myself to listen to Bruce Springsteen's latest album, Working on a Dream. I keep hoping that my initial dismay will pass. So far, it's not working. Those of you who know me know that I love Bruce Springsteen. I would hop in the car with him and drive off down Thunder Road, pushing Mary out of the front seat if I had to. I would walk through Jungleland with him, braving the gang warfare. I would go through hell and back for Bruce Springsteen. But I will not listen to this new album another time. It's too... read more
The 50 Best Movies on Netflix Instant
The 25 Best Movies of 2012 (So…
The 50 Best Movies of 2011
The 30 Best TV Shows on Netflix…
The 50 Best Movies of the Decade…
