In his fifty years of making music professionally, Glen Campbell has made seventy full-length albums and had songs scale the charts seventy-four times. That's shocking when laid out so simply in itself, but that anyone could presume to distill and condense such a mammoth body of work down into a sixteen-track collection is nothing short of amazing. How could it be done? Fans will invariably be disappointed by the omission of one song and inclusion of another but, with so...
The deifying effect that an untimely death seems to have on musicians has always always been a little eerie. After they die, virtually all musicians are elevated to a plateau upon which the conventional wisdom is that everything done by the deceased was part of a plan; like the unlucky musician was working toward something that would have made them the single most important figure in the art form had they not been taken too early. The other (very similar)...
In New York City in the 1970s, a fledgling writer, a bookstore employee and a chronically unemployed street urchin all became inspired by the French Symbolist authors of the nineteenth century that included Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine and Albert Camus and brought their own synthesis of those aesthetics to the stage with a garage-y rock n' roll backing. Those three punks – Patti Smith, Tom Verlaine and Richard Hell – ended up making history by presenting an attractive aural amalgam...
It has been said that the measure of a musician can be gauged by their versatility. When removed from their established comfort zone, will they still be able to turn in an inspired performance that simultaneously does their reputation justice and still has an element of “them” in it, but also works within the constraints of the host artist's muse and style and doesn't attempt to steal the show from that? It's the finest line to straddle and will spell...
There are moments (alcoholics call them moments of clarity, the over-caffeinated call them epiphanies) that, when one peels back the layers of history, look an awful lot like a seemingly forgotten revolutionary occasion. It doesn't seem like the move that ultimately yielded a complete and total shift and rethinking of values and procedures should have happened “right there” in a given timeline but, with enough years removed and enough surveillance of the proceeding damage done, it's impossible to argue because...
When you're a musician as prolific as M. Ward is, invariably there's going to be a running monologue that takes shape in your output but never before has the influence of the singer's prior releases (either on his own or with Zooey Deschanel as She & Him) manifested so plainly as it does on Hold Time. That doesn't mean that the singer's newest effort feels hastily assembled or like a set of discarded, sub-par tracks collected to capitalize on the...
Since the style first appeared in the 80s, there has always been a bit of mania and a perceived sensory deprivation attached to the rituals at an all-night rave. Between the crazed beats, the car alarm sirens and the laser light show, it's easy to lose oneself in the moment and get carried away but, unless something went fundamentally wrong, the possibility of genuine violence was pretty far removed. At the center of the movement and at the core of...
Five years. It has been five years since Ian Thornley crawled out of the crash site left by Big Wreck to begin his solo career. His debut solo outing, Come Again, proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that the guitarist could at least summon the raw and bludgeoning power housed in the best moments of his former band's catalog – if not the delicacy of it. The gamble that Come Again represented did pay off – the title track...
Karen Dalton's In My Own Time comes with a compelling back story. Dalton—a lost voice of the early 60's folk music boom and regular in the Greenwich Village scene—was one of Bob Dylan's favorite singers. Nonetheless, she didn't record until late in the decade, and then only made two albums, both of which quickly faded into obscurity. Dalton struggled with homelessness and drug addiction for much of her life, and died in 1993. Anthology Records has now released In My...
I have to be honest here, I totally slept on this band last year. It’s actually hard to say if I slept on it or just never heard it, because I know how it felt to hear them for the first time and there really is no way I would’ve passed on this. It’s just preposterous. The good thing about figuring this out sooner than later is they are about to start their US tour in support of their album...