REVIEWS

Murray McLauchlan Love Can’t Tell Time (True North Records) When your body of work spans nineteen albums released over a 46-year period, it’s obvious that your love affair with music is a lifelong one. Such is really the only way it could be possible to take Love Can’t Tell Time, Murray McLauchlan’s newest release – by the singer’s own admission, the album is, “A great collection of songs I love to play when I have no other agenda than just...

Old 97’s Graveyard Whistling (ATO/Cadence) The Old 97’s have been touted as one of the alt-country greats for years now but, really, one of the things that has kept listeners coming back for a while now has been the band’s steadfast refusal to believe their own hype and just try to make an album which comes close to answering it. Now, at first, that modesty was cute (what music fan doesn’t like pulling for their heroes against the odds?), but...

King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard Flying Microtonal Banana (ATO/Cadence) Listening to King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard’s ninth album, Flying Microtonal Banana, one is inspired to recall Karl Marx’s fairly damning summation of history’s propensity for repeating itself – “the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce. In this case, there’s no denying that the fairly delightful rock n’ roll King Gizzard is peddling is the farcical incarnation of the psychedelic rock which first materialized in...

Five Alarm Funk Sweat (independent) Without intending to come off as trite, there are occasions when it’s possible to mark certain similarities between a new album and music which has appeared elsewhere in music history, but those moments can still reverberate with excitement because no one saw that music or the connection to anything else coming – from anywhere, ever. Such a moment hit me the moment that the music on Five Alarm Funk’s new album, Sweat, began to emanate...

I knew when I first saw Hampton Yount on Conan that he was someone to watch out for. What made it difficult was that he was called Hampton Yount, so I wasn’t going to remember his name. But his bit about the risks of online dating of men vs women was so clever and witty that it always stuck with me. Hell, I even discussed the idea with friends over drinks. So when I got his full length album Bearable,...

There’s nothing I like better than being completely surprised by a random album sent to me by a label. Especially when you expected comedy albums and get a curveball mized in in the form of a music/comedy album. Especially when you actually end up really enjoying the album. Then especially when you find out the artist is from your hometown of Boston.   Zach Sherwin’s Rap! is all of these things.   Yes, it sounds a lot like Flight of...

Artist: Metallica Album: Hardwired… To Self-Destruct (Deluxe Edition 3CD) Label: Blackened/ADA/Warner Music It’s funny how the psychology of salesmanship works – after a certain point, one has to wonder where the logic goes. A great example of that can be found in the Deluxe Edition, 3CD version of Hardwired… To Self-Destruct. As previously stated in my review of the standard-issue 2CD version of the release, Metallica’s new album is a great trip back to the early, shreddy and fairly lean...

Artist: Rascal Flatts Album: The Greatest Gift Of All Label: Big Machine Records/Sony Music What do people mean when they say “that music moved me”? Moved you from your seat to turn it up? Moved you from the room to get away from the twisted sounds of crashing and banging? Moved you to shake your bottom and get a groove on? For me, music is a background noise that is always on when I am working, cleaning, playing, cooking, bathing...

Artist: David Bowie Album: Legacy (2CD) Label: Columbia/Legacy/Sony Music Over the last forty years, there have been a multitude of “Best of David Bowie” compilations to his new release racks. To date, this critic counts eleven good, sturdy ones, but the methodology for making them has always been the same: “ensure that the core of around ten classic tracks which appeared on ChangesOneBowie (the first Bowie hits comp) are present, then mix and match a list of singles which flow...

Artist: Metallica Album: Hardwired… To Self-Destruct Label: Blackened/ADA/Warner I must confess that it would be very, very easy to find a bigger fan of Metallica than I am. To be perfectly blunt, I haven’t heard a new album by the band that I’ve liked in twenty-five years – and even that was a reach because I thought the Black Album spent more time plodding than rocking. No, I’ve always been a bigger fan of the earlier, “thrash” side of Metallica...