Kurt Vile is an odd looking fellow. Sorry, I just felt the need to get that off my chest. Having close ties to Philadelphia, it's great to catch Kurt Vile live. His latest album is a quiet storm of guitar layers and one of my favorite albums out this year. Having since moved to Boston and maintained my love for all things Vile, it was a given that I was going to be at this show. Vile stuck mostly to new songs on...
It's been very fulfilling following Kurt Vile's career ever since I heard Childish Prodigy. Since then, Vile has done two contradicting things with his music and done them remarkably well, and that is to both quiet down his sound and still keep expanding it. While Childish Prodigy (my favorite of his releases) is a noise rock behemoth, the follow-up EP Square Shells was a perfect appetizer for what was to come, as Vile did away with fuzz and distortion and...
In the decades since rock n' roll established itself as an enduring musical form, a few bands have come along and really marked time by serving up bombastic guitar licks, swaggering and soaring vocals and the personalities (as well as the performances) of players which are so big that they're impossible to forget. The names of some of those artists (like Led Zeppelin, Steppenwolf, Soundgarden and Gomez) have left an indelible mark on music and, in listening to Furiosity, there...
Emmylou Harris has done as much as anyone to make me a country fan, and Old Yellow Moon demonstrates how. Put simply, she and Rodney Crowell deliver the deep heart and soul of country music on this album. Harris has always had a amazing talent for picking musical partners. She has worked with everyone from Bob Dylan to Neil Young, Linda Rondstadt to Willie Nelson, Steve Earle to Mark Knopfler. With each collaborator, she manages to work within their style,...
Haya doin' junky?I know haya SHOULD be doin', ya vein tappin' scum, ya should be itchin' somethin' fierce cuz I ain't ben'ere fer a coupla weeks! So're youse feelin' the need ta getcha hands on some new SWAG? That's what I thought. Lucky fer youse, I ben savin' up an' gotcha a great BIG bag o' SWAG dis week. Are ya happy 'bout dat? I thought so. Awright, le's start wit' a big name first: I swiped to kick-ass tune...
While it was never really addressed at the time of its release, Era Vulgaris was a very problematic album for Queens Of The Stone Age. At the time of that album's making, the record-buying public was snapping up everything it could find with Josh Homme's name on or associated with it and calling it all genius. The storm of approval was spectacular and thick and a lot of Queens' early work was deserving of such praise but, when Era Vulgaris...
To be perfectly frank, country music has only suffered from one problem for the last forty years: a massive inferiority complex. For the last forty years, Country has continually grabbed for the brass ring that Pop music wears, and tried to succor some of the genre's listeners away by trying to play by pop's rules with thoroughly mixed results. In the Seventies and early Eighties, country tried to employ the cartoonishly large disco instrumental arrangements of the day to get...
Most regularly, people look at the largest visible moments in a band's career and assume that those are the explosive instances which define all the successes that said band has enjoyed, but that isn't always true. If one were to look at Rise Against, for example, they'd see 2004's Siren Song of the Counter Culture as being the moment when all of the elements aligned and the band just exploded into the world's popular consciousness. There is validity in that...
When does a band finally get to stand outside the shadow of its own past? That is the first question those who listen to The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here will ask themselves in frustration, because Alice In Chains appears right back where they were when Black Gives Way To Blue came out in most listeners' mind's eye; facing a wall of dubious expectation. Listeners will find themselves asking if singer William DuVall can stand up to Layne Staley's legacy (just...
Of Monsters And Men are certainly wearing their newfound fame and attention well. Formed just three years ago, the folk-flavored quintet charged out of Iceland like a force of nature and has captivated audiences with the beautiful, stunning and soulful vocal interplay of multi-instrumentalists Nanna Bryndís Hilmarsdóttir, Ragnar Þórhallsson, Brynjar Leifsson, Arnar Rósenkranz Hilmarsson and Kristján Páll Kristjánsson and their intricate, folky charms as well. The innate accessibility of...