North Highlands – Wild One
Genuinely quirky Brooklyn chamber-folk act goes electric and hypnotic with its debut album. Come for the hooks, stay for the guitars. | Buy
Ryan Adams – Ashes & Fire
Not his most wildly poetic lyrics, perhaps, but the Alternative Country troubadour’s latest is an exquisitely emotional piece of work. He’s rarely been a better performer. | Live Review | All Posts | Buy
A Classic Education – Call It Blazing
At its best, the Italian band’s debut album is as propulsive and tuneful as the Shins’ early work. Even when they slow down, their usual toolbox — aquatic guitars, forlorn vocals, thoughtful drumming — gets the job done. | “Night Owl” Video | Buy “Night Owl”:mp3
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There were a lot of jams this month! Here are the ones you should pay for with money and what I wrote about them.
Twin Sister – In Heaven | REVIEW
Laura Marling – A Creature I Don’t Know | CONCERT REVIEW)
St. Vincent – Strange Mercy (REVIEW | I still have mixed feelings here, but the first half is the best side of the year)
Wilco – The Whole Love (Drowned in Sound feature)
Jens Lekman – An Argument With Myself EP (ALL POSTS)
Also notable: Ariel Pink’s new single, Sleeping Bags’ debut LP, Geoffrey O’Connor’s solo debut. Didn’t get to the Stepkids, Apparat, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah or the Rapture (that came out, right?). Let’s not talk about Girls.
For the last 13 months, I’ve written a weekly column first for Brand X and currently the Los Angeles Times dubbed L.A. Unheard. The goal is to point out promising new local artists; during a short-lived concert series, we gave them the chance to play some cool shows, too. I’ve tried very hard to avoid hype and trends and go with my gut, which means the column’s probably missed a lot of fresh electro and hip-hop, though we’ve managed to catch Foster the People, Hanni El Khatib and a handful of other breakouts. Hopefully this list, the first of many, will go one step further: these are all bands who deserve to be on a serious label and playing national tours. Help them out with this, industry folks! And for everybody else: enjoy the music and go to the shows. Read the rest of this entry »
The dog days of summer didn’t bring us any new 10.0s, but here’s a handful of worthwhile recent releases as a bated-breath autumn (Wilco! St. Vincent! Real Estate! ARMS! Ryan Adams!) comes ever closer.
Cymbals Eat Guitars – Lenses Alien: The best of the month, Lenses Alien is that increasingly rare bird — a guitar-centric indie-rock album. That’d be enough in these synth-addled times, but the band manages to push themselves and the genre (!) forward with songs that sprawl and shrink to fit with equal parts melody and ferocity. Strong song-for-song but stunning in total.
Pepper Rabbit – Red Velvet Snowball: The band’s sophomore follow-up to Beauregard (itself a collection of EPs) is an improvement on its debut, grounding psych-pop atmospherics with bolder melodies. The choruses will stick in your head, but so, too, will the 1999 Dave Fridmann production influence that pokes cleverly through the tinfoil songwriting. [TRACK REVIEW] >> “Rose Mary Stretch”:mp3
Widowspeak – Widowspeak: Anything on Captured Tracks gets my full attention this year, though the Cat Power gloom of Widowspeak’s debut marks a shift from the label’s usual New Wave revivalism. Effective, if predictable, stuff that’s at its best when it rocks hardest (the four-on-the-floor “Puritan,” the almost-garage-girl-group of “Hard Times”) or throws itself upon Quentin Tarantino’s feet (the Western fantasia of “Gun Shy”). [REVIEW]
Records I didn’t quite get to and still want to: Mr. Heavenly’s debut (their SXSW show was terrific); Thundercat’s The Golden Age of Apocalypse and Hotel Light’s Girl Graffiti. I gave up on Watch the Throne after one spin but it’s probably due for another.
Classics on heavy rotation: New Order – Low-Life; Rose Elinor Dougall – Without Why; Dean Drouillard – Dream at Harmony Motel; The Long Winters - Putting the Days To Bed; Standard Fare – The Noyelle Beat
20 2011 jams, in no particular order. (Just kidding. Of course they’re in order. Not included: Destroyer and Radiohead, because I couldn’t decide.) Read the rest of this entry »
I want to open this with the mild disclaimer that debating whether or not an album is good is like arguing over whether someone ought to like rocky road ice cream or brussel sprouts: passion-rousing, divise, more than a little silly. (Arguing about why: the world’s most interesting pursuit.) If you don’t like these records or like other records more, I salute you; still, I believe the ones I’ve chosen have enough value to recommend that you give them a try, or two, or 10. Music tends to sound better that way, in case any of us have forgotten.
Many of 2011′s most anticipated and most discussed releases have left me moderately charmed at best. “Often likable” is the kindest description I would currently extend to James Blake, TV on the Radio, Bon Iver, Tennis, Bright Eyes, Smith Westerns and tUnE-yArDs; albums by bands I’ve previously loved, such as the Pains of Being Pure at Heart, Fleet Foxes and Iron & Wine, have been painfully disappointing. (Let’s not talk about Odd Future.) It’s a strange and largely disastrous time for indie rock, with nostalgia often cloaking an absence of songwriting chops and the creeping influence of the mainstream and a singles-hungry blogosphere sanding off its outsider idiosyncrasies. Nevertheless, there are still some pretty good records. Here are 10 of them. Read the rest of this entry »
In which your intrepid blogger once again attempts to present you with a handful of records worth buying as the year rolls on (and, starting with this one, older jams I’ve had on heavy rotation).
February/March:
Shugo Tokumaru – Port Entropy (Polyvinyl) | REVIEW >> “Lahaha”:mp3
Radiohead – The King of Limbs (self-released) |REVIEW
Puro Instinct - Headbangers In Ecstasy (Mexican Summer) >> “Stilyagi”:mp3
Brave Irene (ft. Rose Melberg) – Brave Irene (Slumberland) >> “No Fun”:mp3
Toro Y Moi – Underneath The Pine (Carpark) | REVIEW >> “Still Sound”:mp3
Also recommended: The Mountain Goats – All Eternals Deck (Merge), KORT (Lambchop) – Invariable Heartache (City Slang), Cut/Copy – Zonoscope (Modular), R.E.M. – Collapse Into Now (Warner Bros.), Kurt Vile – Smoke Ring For My Halo (Matador)
On heavy rotation the last two months:
Harvey Williams – California (1999) and Rebellion (1994) | REVIEW
Todd Rundgren - Runt: The Ballad of Todd Rundgren (1971)
Always – Thames Valley Leather Club and Other Stories (1988)
Curren$y – Pilot Talk (2010)
Heavenly – Heavenly Vs. Satan (1991)
Previously: January
(Puro Instinct photo by David Greenwald)
There were a lot of jams this month! Here are the ones you should pay for with money and what I wrote about them.
In which your intrepid blogger once again attempts to present you with a handful of records worth buying as the year rolls on (and, starting with this one, older jams I’ve had on heavy rotation).
