Showing 1134 results for: Reviews
Neil Diamond – Hot August Night - October 2012 October 1st, 2012
In 1973, my mother returned from a lengthy bridgework session, where the dentist played her what became her favorite record, Neil Diamond’s career making live double, Hot August Night. It’s a more interesting set than I, age 5, then realised. The former Tin Pan Alley tunesmith, brandishes his cast iron contributions to the Great American…
Various Artists – Electric Eden, Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music - September 2012 September 30th, 2012
Rob Young’s book Electric Eden, for which this double CD is a companion, charted the unruly assimilation of British folk music into Folk Rock. A rare demo version of Fairport Convention’s monumental 1969 epic A Sailor’s Life is a key track, jumping the hedgerow to a world of wyrd folk hybrids. A shortened version of…
Ken Stringfellow – Danzig In The Moonlight - September 2012 September 30th, 2012
The ubiquitous multi-instrumentalist Ken Stringfellow staffed Alex Chilton’s Big Star for seventeen years, prolonged REM’s painful decline, and co-fronts Seattle’s resilient power pop professionals The Posies.His solo albums beat his band projects, omnivorously devouring vast swathes of canonical American pop tropes, tailgating bigger beasts like Wilco or The Flaming Lips. Drop Your Pride is a…
Matana Roberts – Coin Coin Chapter Two : Mississippi Moonchile - September 2012 September 30th, 2012
Fans of Roberts’ fulsome free jazz alto blow-outs might have hoped for a few more incantatory explosions before she embarked on Coin Coin, an ongoing conceptual composition exploring of black American identity. The saxophonist and her sympathetically psychic supporting quartet are intermittently skewed by unwelcome operatic interruptions. But Roberts’ own soulful vocal is a quiet…
Carolyn Mark – The Queen Of Vancouver Island - September 2012 September 16th, 2012
Carolyn Mark writes fifties-flavoured indie-country pop songs, with an unexpectedly bittersweet edge. Our touring hustler heroine is professionally removed from straight society, and spooked by encroaching middle age, failed romances, and the inevitability of compromise. Baby Goats sounds upbeat, but the kids at the petting zoo aren’t hers, everyone seems so young, and she’s alone.…
feedtime – The Aberrant Years - September 2012 September 16th, 2012
Box Sets were once the preserve of canonical Mojo magazine cover stars. Now everyone’s liquidizing their assets before all recorded music becomes worthless. Here’s four CDs of Australia’s finest Eighties pre-grunge unknowns, feedtime. With two founder members that liked Seventies cock rock and pre-war blues respectively, feedtime flayed Duracel bunny roots rhythms with hardcore noise,…