Hall

If you’re a punk rock fan and you don’t know the Spits, then I pity you. You need to get on that. You need to get on the mystery that is the Spits. Their entire existence is a big ol’ question mark. You want to define their music? It’s lo-fi garage punk rock, both futuristic but hopelessly old fashioned. Kind of like futuristic for the 50s. Imagine big robots which are actually just spray painted carboard boxes. And who are...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Black Friday-released Run, Stop & Drop (The Needle) EP by the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. It’s not common for a jazz album which was made in a recording studio to really reach out and grab a listener’s attention. Let’s be honest here; jazz was originally music which was born onstage and developed there with the help of gifted players who spent hours crafting it, grooming it, refining it and making it...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the So It Is LP by the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. I must confess that, after having listened to music on a daily basis for three decades (first as a fan, then as a critic and a fan), I have grown cynical and hypercritical to jazz. The reason for that is pretty simple: I believe that jazz was once a cutting edge form which puahsed the possibilities of time, rhythm, meter, intonation,...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Record Store Day release of The Real Royal Albert Hall Concert 1966 2LP by Bob Dylan. It’s incredible how personally fans of folk music took the form in the 1960s. Back then, any new development or movement away from classicism was seen as abhorrent and rejected wholesale by purists. Of course, taking such a rigid stance was akin to inviting some upstart to come along and upset it and, in 1966,...