Posts by Patrick Flanary

[rating=6.00] With its sixth album in as many years, Pond, an Australian band with members who also play in Tame Impala, has kicked its love affair with blues-metal riffs. Still hell-bent on pursuing a stadium-size psychedelic sound, Pond is now taking things slower, embracing synth-heavy, sleepwalking songs that seem to float a galaxy away from […]

[rating=7.00] Alberta-based Viet Cong pairs two members of the defunct band Women with two guitarists from associated groups. The first album from this mutated collective is heavier than past projects, driven by dark-sunshine hooks and jarring mid-song maneuvering. The seven songs that make up Viet Cong feel like twice as many, not because of their […]

[rating=7.00] Despite having made eight albums of his own, Daniel Lanois still gets his bulk of praise for the records he produced for others, specifically those that went on to achieve superstar status: U2’s The Joshua Tree, Peter Gabriel’s So, and Bob Dylan’s Time Out Of Mind. Whether the legacies of those artists, specifically U2, […]

A top producer’s attention was on the line Tuesday night during a performance by the Los Angeles-based rock band Warpaint. Their set, at Webster Hall in New York, brought out Brian Burton, the musician and producer best known as Danger Mouse, who visited backstage after the show. “I came to check it out,” he told […]

[rating=9.00] Any album that opens with a didgeridoo and a cavalry of finger cymbals deserves at least one listen. Morrissey’s gorgeous tenth record, World Peace Is None of Your Business, demands many more—despite an early lecture on global meddling. “Each time you vote, you support the process,” he taunts in his velvet croon several times on the […]

[rating=7.00] For two weeks last year, Merrill Garbus, the leader of the duo tUnE-yArDs, studied dancing and drumming in Haiti “to situate myself in a non-western musical tradition,” as she later put it in The Talkhouse. There, half a world from her studio in Oakland, Garbus began to extract herself from a creative rut. A […]

[rating=6.00] John Frusciante comes full circle with Enclosure, completing what he calls a “musical statement” that began four years and several experimental recordings ago. Now half a decade removed from Red Hot Chili Peppers, the band he quit in 2008, Frusciante has exorcised the abstract-electronica monster he struggled to free upon his own liberation. He […]

[rating=6.00] More than once on his third album with the War on Drugs, Adam Granduciel sings about traveling in reverse and reckoning with the past. Both mirror his road-worn journey behind the making of Lost in the Dream; the group’s frontman visited six studios to experiment and produce this record after spending two years touring […]

[rating=5.00] 311 has spent months promoting its first proper album since 2009, rallying the base with email blasts, even setting a March 11th release date to coincide with the concert tradition known as 311 Day. The first event happened in 2000, in pre-Katrina New Orleans, and has since returned every two years, with few exceptions. […]

[rating=6.00] “It’s a totally selfish effort,” Tom Petty once remarked of making albums apart from his band, the Heartbreakers. Not so for Benmont Tench, Petty’s resident pianist, who for his own solo effort, You Should Be So Lucky, welcomed guests and put much of his project in their hands. Tench’s friends didn’t exactly wait for […]

A 17-piece orchestra took its seats in darkness, minutes before a snippet from a tennis match — sampled from a commentator announcing a score of “thirty-thirty” — introduced Deltron 3030. For its second New York show this month, the hip-hop trio packed Highline Ballroom to promote Event II, the long-in-the-works sequel to the group’s apocalyptic, […]

[rating=8.00] Like an eulogy in reverse, a dreary organ hums the first notes of Mazzy Star’s first work in 17 years. During that time, Hope Sandoval and David Roback never stopped writing and recording together. This much is clear in the dreamy hour of loneliness that follows on Seasons of Your Day, a gently numbing […]

[rating=7.00] Del the Funky Homosapien & co.’s postscript to their riveting, world-gone-mad opus, Deltron 3030, picks up in the post-apocalyptic year 3040, where life and all its forms have surrendered to the calamitous pit the 2000 album only warned us about. Corporate evil and economic collapse dominate the dark narrative of Event II, the second […]

[rating=6.00] First, a word on that jacket cover: is this a band selling, or a band for sale? The sign hanging above the pictured consignment shop/hair salon — Stylz Unlimited — suggests a bit of both. And in the foreground, MGMT’s Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser appear open for business, content with mingling among the […]

Flash floods disrupted Violent Femmes 18 minutes into their set Thursday in Central Park, and ultimately halted the band’s first New York show since 2007. After playing only five songs, and waiting 20 minutes for the lightning strikes to pass, they were told to cut the performance short. “It’s nobody’s fault; it’s the law,” bassist […]

“I probably shoulda told ya earlier,” Buster Poindexter warned, hooch in hand, halfway through his second set of the night. “But I’m a little nuts.” The line summed up David Johansen’s return as his R&B lounge-act alter ego, revived in April for a handful of shows after a 15-year absence. Back in 1983, a decade […]

[rating=7.00] Even as he toured with Red Hot Chili Peppers in 2007, John Frusciante, the band’s guitarist, hauled a synthesizer and a drum machine between hotel rooms. His mind was on making different music, though the road offered little time to dabble. So when the group took a two-year break, Frusciante never returned; his solo […]

To pin the R&B label on Land of CanAan would miss what Marques Toliver’s first album captures: a junction of soul and classical sensibility, where a violinist with a killer vocal shakes up both genres.

he Slackers, a six-piece ska and rock-steady band from New York, premiered a handful of songs Saturday night for a crowd of 55 packed into a Manhattan loft. Dubbed a “secret show,” the sold-out performance paired the group’s in-the-works singles with covers and requests.

One CD might have done the job, but there’s little bloat here and more than enough to entice die-hards and new listeners with a proper reflection on the group’s genesis, process and closure. Essential Oils draws from all 14 of their recordings between 1978 and 2002. At 36 songs, the album traces a journey of demanding social justice through song, ones that evolve from polished punk to textured pop to industrial mayhem.