album

Artist: Fat White Family Album: Songs for Our Mothers Label: Fat Possum Records Isn’t it incredible how, over time, the basic structures of established musics can become re-imagined/re-engineered for no other reason than they’ve become displaced from the time and places they were first developed? The possibility of time and place being so important for something non-corporeal like music may seem like a dubious one but, in listening to Fat White Family’s new album, Songs for Our Mothers, it suddenly...

  Artist: Dandy Warhols Album: Distortland Label: Dine Alone It’s unlikely that there is any band in rock right now more underrated than the Dandy Warhols. A lot of that has historically had to do with the fact that the band has seemed to go out of its way to throw fans a series of elegant braking balls to confuse and frustrate them; since Thirteen Tales from Urban Bohemia (a.k.a. “the breakthrough”) came out in 2000, Courtney Taylor-Taylor and company...

Artist: Iggy Pop Album: Post Pop Depression Label: Rekords Rekords/Loma Vista/Universal I must confess that I could not bring myself to review Iggy Pop’s newest album immediately upon its release for personal reasons. Those reasons stemmed from David Bowie and my appreciation for both artists’ music; Bowie and Iggy have shared an unusual, symbiotic relationship for decades (at least, they have in my mind) and, at Bowie’s passing, I wasn’t sure first how Iggy would respond and, second, if I...

Artist: The Rubens Album: Hoops Label: Warner Brothers Do you know the reason why the catbird is able to immitate other bird and animal sounds, reader? It’s actually a defense mechanism: catbirds want to either blend in with their surroundings and not get noticed by potential predators, or imitate a sound which will scare potential predators away. The catbird’s abilities come to mind when one thinks about The Rubens too; on first listen, it’s easy for listeners to melt into...

Artist: Greg Laswell Album: Everyone Thinks I Dodged A Bullet Label: Vanguard/Concord Both the joy and peril of music and attempting to explain how or why it’s good to someone else can often be found in the language employed to accomplish the act. It’s strange how it can work sometimes; like some words and combinations of them sound exciting but, when one really attempts to break it all down, it quickly becomes confusing. For example (and this word appears predominantly...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the blackstar LP by David Bowie It’s amazing how outside factors can affect the qualities of the music on an album and change its focus. Any number of stimuli could play an active roll in the change – the medium through which the music is presented (be it vinyl record, compact disc, cassette or mp3 – whatever), the players who contributed to the recording or even unforeseen events which occurred completely outside...

At the beginning of February the groundhog told us that winter is fake and summer is real. This is probably in lieu of global warming. Some states experience a very summery winter – states like Florida. With the inspiration of forever summer comes upbeat pop with an experimental synth-y sound in Animal Collective’s tenth studio album Painting With released on February 19th, 2016. While band member Deakin is still M.I.A (he was also absent from 2009’s Merriweather Post Pavilion), Avery...

As a child, I hated surprises. It was pure torture to know that you don’t know what you thought you knew and as a child know-it-all, this frustrated me. But this past Friday, Say Anything surprised me and all their fans. How? Surprise album! Unexpectedly, the band released their 7th studio album “I Don’t Think It Is” on Equal Vision Records. Their audience of grown-up punks woke up to find another consistently good album released by their favorite band of the...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the vinyl reissue of  …With His Hot Blue Guitar! by Johnny Cash. Johnny Cash with His Hot Blue Guitar! is a tough album to discuss in 2016 because, honestly, what can we say about Johnny Cash and his music which hasn’t been said countless times already? The man had an incredible impact on world culture and his music is such a big part of American culture that it’s simply embedded in its...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into Circle Jerks’ debut album, Group Sex. At this point, six years after the band that Keith Morris, Steven McDonald, Dimitri Coats and Mario Rubalcaba started took off (ahem – no pun intended) and brought hardcore punk into a much brighter and broader spotlight before a much larger audience, the history of where OFF! came from and the circumstances which got them started have been well-documented. It is already a matter of public...