Posts by Aaron Teixeira

Marching through Boston, up the shore a bit and landing in Harvard Square, Calexico brought serious heat to the packed house at The Sinclair. We can posit that it wasn’t the “dry heat” of a Tucson evening, but the music on this Thursday night in Cambridge, MA drew heavily enough from Edge of the Sun […]

Jacco Gardner is an explorer of the human psyche. He recently released his second full-length album Hypnophobia, but even in that short span of time has made an indelible mark on the face of modern psychedelic pop/rock. The 27 year-old Dutch songwriter initially turned heads with his 2013 Cabinet of Curiosities, earning him comparisons to […]

[rating=8.00] Charlie Parr’s latest album  (roughly the *sixteenth* from the Minnesotan roots mainstay) is a fascinating feat of fine songwriting and quality production work. Recorded at Down Yonder Farm in North Carolina, it shows a complex maturity while simultaneously harkening back to Parr’s earlier, primitive-style recordings. Still, there is a progressivism in its eleven tracks that both compliments and defies the […]

[rating=8.00] Ryley Walker is not ashamed of the bevy of influences who inform his sound. Primrose Green – his third solo album – finds the folksy singer/songwriter fully embracing the weight of those heavy hitters on his own sound, right down to the early 70s Van Morrison cover art.  The success of the album is […]

Touring behind his first album in nearly seven years, José González took the stage of the Paradise Rock Club, toting his beautiful acoustic guitar and a young lifetime’s worth of beautiful songs. The Swedish folk singer’s voice was cool and expressive voice as weaved tunes both new and old, transfixing the spellbound, packed-like-sardines audience of […]

[rating=6.00] At this stage of the game, Andy Cabic’s so-called “freak folk” band Vetiver has become a vehicle for the singer/songwriter’s experimentation in a variety of genres, styles and soundscapes. With the release of 2015’s Complete Strangers, Cabic has arrived at a place where the band is a malleable, living and breathing thing, where he […]

Chicago’s Ryley Walker is a folk singer whose unique brand of musicianship is a melding of styles, from the fingerpicking schools of Bert Jansch and Pentangle to the blue-eyed soul of Van Morrison and the free-jazz guitar of Sonny Sharrock. He can discuss any number of these influences, and although he doesn’t claim to have some all-encompassing […]

Marco Benevento arrived in Boston recently to deliver a set of music that touched on many aspects of the veteran pianist’s career. Playing nearly two hours with the Marco Benevento Trio, the keyboardist was augmented by Dave Dreiwitz (Ween; Joe Russo’s Almost Dead) on bass, and Andrew Borger (Norah Jones, Tom Waits, Ani DiFranco) on […]

[rating=8.00] The eponymous debut of Tomás Pagán Motta is a feat of honest writing, earnest singing and beefy but subtle instrumental arrangements. The eight tracks are tight, yet spacey; poignant and pronounced, yet ethereal and mysterious. With this album, Motta has consciously tackled the idiom of progressive folk head-on, displaying an adept knowledge of the […]

John Medeski is keeping busy. In late February, the jazz-funk heavyweight and member of Medeski, Martin & Wood spent some time at his alma mater giving a master class, participated in a program celebrating the diverse heritage of jazz, and played two sets in Cambridge, Massachusetts to kick off a tour with his newest project, […]

Fans of Grateful Dead music have much reason to celebrate of late. With the affectionately (and, from a marketing perspective, cleverly) dubbed “GD50” celebration – 2015 marking what would have been the band’s 50th anniversary – there has been an abundance of artists taking advantage of the reignited interest in the extensive songbook of Grateful […]

[rating=4.00] Wasted on the Dream is an ode to a lost time period: a wistful love-letter to some bygone era, or perhaps simply an imaginary creation of JEFF the Brotherhood, the songwriting duo that cultivated it. In any instance the thesis is, for the most part, a sham: an alternate timeline where bad mustaches, muscle […]

When the an established band sees one of its member form a side-project, sometimes the strength of that project threatens to eclipse the band from which it branched off of. Moon Duo, with their third full-length, is poised to do just that, as Ripley Johnson’s little experiment in synth & garage drone rock has produced […]

[rating=7.00] At one time, extended instrumental beauty, as is executed on Erik Deutsch’s Outlaw Jazz, dominated the airwaves. In our universe however, where a concise melody and less thoughtfulness in song structure constitutes a more attractive commodity, there may be a few fewer outlets for such a well-hewn and uniquely developed album. Nonetheless, Outlaw Jazz […]

Futuristic impressionists DRKWAV channeled the performance space of the Cambridge Regattabar into a canvas of deep, intricately textured jazz fusion. Two lengthy sets provided the trio of John Medeski, Adam Deitch, and Skerik to ability to explore some of the more menacing aspects of psychedelic jazz, all the while keeping a pulsing, funky rhythm that […]

Los Angeles band Francisco The Man brought some heat to Allston Rock City’s Great Scott this past Sunday evening. On tour in support of their first full-length LP Loose Ends, the West Coast group’s fiery power pop lit up lit up the audience with emotive songwriting and sharp, fuzz-driven musicianship. Francisco The Man wasted no […]

[rating=8.00] There’s timelessness in the music of Appalachia: the haunting sonnets of lost love, the revenge-fueled murder ballads that resonate across the ages. From the English maritime shanties that birthed them, through the 20st century collections of Harry Smith and Alan Lomax and into the present day, these songs have remained relevant. On Seasonal Hire, […]

[rating=8.00] On his debut album for Paradise of Bachelors label, North Carolina’s Jake Xerxes Fussell has assembled a fascinating and often sublime collection of songs adapted from the songbook of obscure, near-forgotten and amazing old-time music. A native of Georgia, Fussell has spent a thorough portion of his life discovering and unearthing these old tunes. […]

On a frigid night in snow-blanketed Allston Village Damien Jurado confidently held court at Brighton Music Hall, quietly taking charge and transmuting the brick walled room into the haze of a warm, intimate folk club. Drawing from an extensive song catalog, Mr. Jurado delivered a lengthy set packed with crowd pleasers, peppered with semi obscure […]

[rating=8.00] With their new, bold and powerful release, San Francisco’s Two Gallants have created an album which glares – not peers – into the abyss and draws on its contents to create songs of serious emotional weight. We Are Undone is an excitingly diverse collection of songs that exceeds in upsetting expectations right from the […]