Whose line is it anyway? No matter. Whether it’s jazz patriarch Bucky Pizzarelli or his son, fellow seven-string guitar master John, fashioning melodic embellishments and spinning single-note improvisations on Three for All, the level of musicianship is consistently high. What’s more, the same can be said for guitarist Ed Laub’s knowing support, scarcely a surprise given his long association with père Pizzarelli.
Not surprising, too, are the songs chosen for this date. “Body and Soul,” “I Got Rhythm,” “All the Things You Are” and “Avalon” are among the vintage pop classics, while lesser-known tunes, including the Dick McDonough-Carl Kress treat “Stage Fright,” round out the collection. Even the most weathered selections, however,…
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1. The Fall – Fibre Book Troll
2. Gill Landry – Funeral in My Heart
3. FFS – Johnny Delusional
4. Jim O’Rourke – This Weekend
5. Richard Thompson – Beatnik Walk
6. Funkadelic & Soul Clap feat. Sly Stone – In Da Kar
7. Michael Head & the Strands – Poor Jill
8. Soapkills – Galbi
9. Leftfield – Universal Everything
10. Meg Baird – Counterfeiters
11. The Pre New – Psychedelic Lies
12. William Tyler – The Sleeping Prophet
13. Jah Wobble – Merry Go Round
14. Trembling Bells – Killing Time in London Fields
15. Bitchin Bajas – Marimba
Having debuted in late-2012 with the sublime Raw Love 7” for The Great Pop Supplement label and the dreamy download-only “Driftwood Royalty” single, it’s taken some time for the Cambridge-grown Violet Woods to fashion an album-sized release. After two immersive sessions in the analogue Aladdin’s Cave of London’s Soup Studios during the course of the last year or so the quartet – led by moonlighting Fuzzy Lights singer/guitarist Xavier Watkins – deliver a 9-track LP that seeks to reconcile and expand the two sides of the group’s psyche-pop equations.
Exploring fuzzier and more layered textures overall, this eponymous set takes things deeper than the harmony-coated 12-string twang and jangle beginnings of “Raw Love” and “Driftwood…
While his tenure as the frontman for the legendary Roxy Music remained his towering achievement, singer Bryan Ferry also carved out a successful solo career that continued in the lush, sophisticated manner perfected on the group’s final records.
Born September 26, 1945, in Washington, England, Ferry, the son of a coal miner, began his musical career as a singer with the rock outfit the Banshees while studying art at the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne under pop conceptualist Richard Hamilton. He later joined the Gas Board, a soul group featuring bassist Graham Simpson; in 1970, Ferry and Simpson formed Roxy Music. Within a few years, Roxy Music had become phenomenally successful, affording Ferry the opportunity to cut his first solo LP in 1973.
Ken Whiteley is one of Canada’s most respected “roots” musicians. Drawing on his incredibly rich background in blues, gospel and folk styles, this 7 time Juno award nominee is always a wonderful addition to any festival or concert series.
He has played at virtually every major folk festival in Canada and performed and recorded with such legends as Pete Seeger, John Hammond Jr., Tom Paxton, Blind John Davis, Stan Rogers, The Campbell Brothers, Guy Davis, Raffi, Linda Tillerey & the Cultural Heritage Choir and countless others. A prolific songwriter, a gifted and versatile instrumentalist and a powerful singer, Whiteley’s music communicates themes of freedom, love, spiritual aspiration and social comment. His performances are presented…
Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin release their sixth full-length LP The High Country, via Polyvinyl Records. The 11-track LP was recorded as a trio consisting of Philip Dickey, Will Knauer and Tom Hembree, a founding member who had left the band but came back to “stir things up in the best way possible and demand we play louder and faster,” as Dickey puts it. The High Country, their first LP since 2013’s Fly By Wire, was recorded at Seattle’s legendary Hall of Justice by engineer Beau Sorensen (Superchunk, Garbage).
On ‘Step Brother City’, Dickey doesn’t address a single love interest, but the whole of whatever typically makes men obsess: “All the kids’ songs and poems are all about you/and all the bad ones, too… God who knows how anyone could live…
The quavering amiability of Kyle Field’s backwards, barroom voice lies somewhere beyond its unsteady boundaries. There’s a smirking rebellion to all things Little Wings that’s endlessly appealing, a knowing quality that’s genuinely interested in slippage — the space between language and meaning, signifier and signified. Field glides by on his threadbare falsetto, delivering phrases with innocent solemnity, like a child who sings with determined pleasure for no audience but themselves. But he’s far slyer than a child, reciting potty humor for the lowbrow thrill, mixing it with sage wisdom, rendering both meaningless, or equally valuable. For all the fascination of his phrasing, howling, and head-voice mania, it’s the lyrics to Little Wings’ songs that are the most…
Give Anti-Flag their due: They’re pretty relentless. For more than 20 years, the spirited Pittsburgh punks have worked tirelessly to make their music count for something more than cheap thrills and mindless rebellion. But the band’s latest, American Spring, shows some cracks in the armor.
“There must be more to life than this,” frontman Justin Sane muses to himself on “Walk Away”. That’s a worrysome thought coming from one of the genre’s most populist champions, but maybe there’s something to it. Sane may or may not be contemplating his band’s punk rock lot in life with that line, but either way, American Spring feels a little boxed in. Ten albums into a fruitful career, Anti-Flag is still chiseling away at the social ills that irk them, but it’s hard to shake the feeling…
If we’re always listening, we’re always changing. Last year was a time of transformation for Circuit des Yeux‘s Haley Fohr, as she toured to support the self-released Overdue. After a solo set at the Hopscotch Music Festival in September left her questioning both the crowd’s intentions and her own, Fohr wrote, “I feel that I must arm myself with sound, with musicians, and take back what I feel has been stolen from me with an army of friends and supporters.” So after years of mostly going alone, In Plain Speech is Fohr’s invitation to change.
Like her friend and fellow Chicagoan Ryley Walker’s recent Primrose Green, the songwriter and multi-instrumenalist surrounds herself with some of the city’s most creative — and, more importantly, most sympathetic — musicians on In Plain Speech:…
These days, Bryce Dessner‘s résumé is near-equal parts modern classical and rock music. In addition to his role as a guitarist in the National alongside twin brother Aaron, he has a solo album of orchestral work with Jonny Greenwood; he’s written and recorded pieces for the Kronos Quartet; he’s curated Cincinnati’s weirdest festival; he participated in the hyper-collaborative work “The Long Count” for the Brooklyn Academy of Music. As for his day job, he’s sneaky about his influences: Strings might not regularly grace the National’s music, but Dessner’s simple repetitions often recall Steve Reich’s Electric Counterpoint or Rhys Chatham’s “Guitar Trio”. On his sophomore solo release, Music for Wood and Strings, he aims to blur the boundaries separating his two chosen…
In Bad Love, Summer Camp has written an 11-song essay about the hopeless side of love, the side you know is no good but you can’t help wanting. The heartache might hurt, but it hurts in a good way – the kind of pain you keep prodding with visits to their Facebook profile to see if it still stings. It all feels real in the way that a dream feels… real. This is what Summer Camp do so brilliantly; they create a world that you can wander around and get lost in for 40 minutes, a world where everything is very slightly askew. The magic happens in the little pauses and spaces in the songs, when you’re waiting for the thing you know is going to happen to happen. It’s inevitable that after “This is real in the way that a dream feels” you’re going to get “real” but there’s that pause. That moment.
Unknown Mortal Orchestra release its third studio album, Multi-Love, on May 26th via Jagjaguwar Records. Spanning nine tracks, it serves as the follow-up to 2013’s II. According to a press release, “The new songs channel the spirit of psych innovators without ignoring the last 40 years of music, forming a flowing, cohesive whole that reflects restless creativity. Here, [frontman Ruban] Nielson reflects on relationships: airy, humid longing, loss, the geometry of desire that occurs when three people align. Where he addressed the pain of being alone on II, Multi-Love takes on the complications of being together.”
Nielson said the band’s goal was to “rebel against the typical view of what an artist is today,” and instead to play the role of “a curator.”
When Brandon Welchez and Charles Rowell started the scuzz pop duo Crocodiles, it’s unlikely that they imagined they would ever make an album as unapologetically pop as Boys. Their previous record, Crimes of Passion, took their sound to unprecedented realms of hookiness, slickness, and radio-ready digestibility. It was also their best record yet. Boys gives it a solid run for its title, though. Working with new producer Martin Thulin in Mexico City, the duo recorded a batch of songs that are so catchy and fun that, even when getting a little serious, they still stick in the brain like freshly chewed bubblegum. What’s good is that they don’t sacrifice any of the guitar noise or blown-out reverb that they’ve utilized since their origin; instead, they’ve refined and focused it, much…
In interviews, members of The Vaccines have said they’re making music for the moment, with the understanding that it may well lose its luster within a few years or even months. In the case of the band’s third full-length album, English Graffiti, that means jettisoning post-punk thrash in favor of a sturdier sound with which The Vaccines’ members seem close and comfortable: Top 40 pop from the early to mid-’80s.
It doesn’t take long for English Graffiti to settle into its groove. Two minutes in, the same lo-res guitar crunch that Freddie Cowan uses to usher in “Handsome” enters a slow, sultry burn through the heavy opening chords of “Dream Lover.” But even that song’s booming production and doomy riffs can’t conceal singer Justin Young’s ulterior…
Wryly labelling themselves as “tropicalia pop” (“apparently”, says their Facebook), London-based Cristobal and the Sea don’t take themselves too seriously. But, their impressively pan-European roster (Spain, Portugal, Corsica, and Britain) infuses this debut EP Peach Bells with such a rustic, sunkissed personality, opening track Gardens pretty much transports you to a dusky San Tropez bar and keeps you there for the next four numbers.
Equal parts continentally passionate and warmly playful, Peach Bells hops from cheeky bossa nova (Violet Tear) to foot-stomping flamenco (My Love (Ay Ay Ay)) and sweltering psychedelia (Zorro), with flute and Latin yelps mixing with classical Spanish guitar and dreamy melodies. It’s a simple formula but fortunately never feels like a cheap gimmick.
The title Fourth World, vol. 1: Possible Musics has a brainy and academic ring to it, but according to Jon Hassell, the record is at least 50% body music. “The basic metaphor is that of the north and south of a person is a projection of the north and south of the globe,” the composer, improviser, and trumpet player, now 77, explained in an interview earlier this year. “A mind formatted by language and located in the head, compared with the area of wildness and sensuality below the waist where dance and music and procreation reigns.”
However, the first time through, Possible Musics — which Hassell created in 1980 in collaboration with producer Brian Eno — you might find that “wildness” and “sensuality” are not the first adjectives that come to mind. It is eerie, dreamlike, and…
Following a gaggle of home-crafted CD-R releases and online tracks, Spanish producer Cráneo Prisma took his bass-happy indie electronica project Holögrama to the next level with Waves, a proper debut released in 2014 on mind-expanding Chicago-based label Trouble in Mind.
Even though the album is a mere six tracks long, Prisma manages to create a gorgeous environment of affable rhythms, hypnotic droning pop songs, and textural ambience that recalls various chapters in the history of experimental pop music. Both opening track “My Bicycle” and the following tune “Moonlight” have booming, rubbery synth basslines and pulsing motorik rhythms. The friendly repetition of these songs shows a direct timeline of influence, starting with the zoned-out…
True lovers of indie pop, that of the saddest, most heartbreaking variety, know that a Bobby Wratten project is guaranteed to deliver all the tears and melancholic feels one poor soul can handle. The Field Mice, Northern Picture Library, Trembling Blue Stars…records by these groups rate among the finest sad pop ever made. After taking a break from breaking hearts for a few years, Wratten returned with Lightning in a Twilight Hour and it’s plain at once from seeing the band’s name that there isn’t going to be a lot of laughs involved. After a typically lovely EP, Slow Changes, was released in early 2015, Wratten and a very familiar crew (longtime engineer Ian Catt, former bandmates Michael Hiscock, Anne Mari Barker-Davies, and Beth Arzy) returned quickly with a full album,…
Gypsophilia was initially borne from Django Reinhart’s gypsy-jazz, but over the past decade the group have spawned their own distinct “gypsophilian” sound.
The seven-piece ensemble are known for leaving a lasting live impression, delivering danceable, genre-defying music to festival crowds and cramped clubs alike. The band describe their sound as “angular, sweet, nostalgic, modern and raucous,” and they took that energy to Joel Plaskett’s New Scotland Yard studio in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, to make their latest record.
Night Swimming marks a departure from Gypsophilia’s usual process of recording live, opting to hone their sound a bit more with the help of producer Joshua Van Tassel (David Myles,…
The Splits and their new LP defy easy classification. They are the kind of band that can be well received at hardcore fests, and then turn around and go on tour with garagepunk bands. There are definite dark undertones and a slight post-punk influence to their music and lyrics, but this is still far more aggressive and stripped down than the sounds of the currently fashionable goth-revival thing.
The band lists some of their favorites as Poison Idea, Testors, Dead Moon, Pagans, Wipers, Marked Men, and Varuas, all of which make sense after listening to the album. Think of the dark, driving sounds of the bands born of American Pacific Northwest winters, mixed with the trashy rock n’ roll sensibilities of Memphis, along with an abiding love of obscure 70’s punk.