Posts by Shane Handler

8-year old Ryan Bingham sounds like a smoky roadhouse, complete with white whiskers and  gnarly Marlboros  enabling him to sound years beyond the tender late 20's. 

With half undecipherable melodies, half indie pop, Dirty Projectors mash up a style that reflects the work of Deerhoof, capturing a disjointed knack of melody that is otherwise fascinating and pretentiously artsy.   At first listen, you’ll probably want to run to the more “welcoming” sounds of Wilco..

Unfortunate for those that despise hearing anything to do with Dave Matthews Band and his musical duffle of summer-time fun, but a new DMB album seems to always hit around #1 on the charts – such as the case here with this latest effort – Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King.

Their full length debut, Manners is fun stuff, mildly annoying, but filled with endless keyboards and studio effects that use the 1980’s as a constant reference point.

Sharing the same name with a certain “shoeless” baseball player, Joe Jackson has probably suffered a time or two from an identity crisis. For this Mr. Joe Jackson, the English singer-songwriter, composer, and pianist, he’s probably fine that his otherwise common name provides him a sense of creative freedom.

After the Nirvana revolution, you couldn’t even get two of those 80’s hair bands on a stage together in any house bigger than 5,000.  Well if you do the decade math and now some of those same bands that rocked big ampitheaters in the 90’s are doing it again today (with the help of $20 lawn and back reserved pavilion tickets).   The one thing is, that of these bands (NIN) sounded mighty relevant while the other (Jane’s Addiction) appeared to be going through the motions on this Phoenix date of the cleverly coined NIN/JA tour.

Bowling Green, Kentucky has never been a hot spot of start-up rock bands, but Cage The Elephant, led by brothers Matt and Brad Shultz have garnered a worthwhile buzz as garage rockers, making them Kentucky’s second most popular rockers behind My Morning Jacket.

Thanks to the good guys at Wespac, they have given the Valley two days of much needed roots music. The past six years of the festival have attracted The Black Crowes, Ratdog, Bruce Hornsby, Solomon Burke, Gov’t Mule and Los Lobos to the mainstage.  Let us hope they keep attracting this kind of low-key talent  to safeguard the McDowell Mountain Music Festival as one of the better kept secrets on the festival scene.

While other male/female duos like She & Him, have graced the covers of magazines, The Bird and the Bee, have made a fashionable statement while making sounds from the 60’s and 70’s sound contemporary.

Doves, unlike their aviary moniker aren’t so peaceful as they are graceful and edgey, as Kingdom of Rust flies with more sonic flairs.

First things first; just by looking at a picture of Mastodon front-man Brent Hinds, you may not want to stare too hard as his gnarly look, he may jump out of the picture and strangle you to death.  But upon listening to his band’s fourth full length effort Crack The Skye, you kind of go the way of Master of Puppets- this shit is heavy by its got melody and texture.

When a band sells out their esteemed hometown club, in this case, First Avenue in Minneapolis, it’s a sign that proclaims –“yeah, we made it.”  Such is the theme of the Hold Steady DVD/CD combo – A Positive Rage – where the crowds get bigger and the band is running fast on momentum.

In the midst of a tour supporting two new Merge albums  – 2008’s Conor Oberst and Outer South, due May5th – Conor Oberst and The Mystic Valley Band had a couple albums worth of material to rock out to on this April evening.  Sporting a big flat brimmed black sombrero that he got on the road a couple days earlier, Oberst looked all the part of his

Hmmm, the cello, it’s such an under-rated instrument in rock circles these days.   But for Other Lives, a quaint quintet from Stillwater, OK, the cello's sorrowful sound makes the band “complete.”

There was a point in the middle of Leonard Cohen’s performance at the Dodge Theater where he admitted,  “I’m very grateful to you all for keeping my songs alive after all these years. “  This was rightfully so, considering his last tour was back in '94.  Fifteen years is a long time to wait for this brilliant mind and voice to recreate his songs on the live stage.  

Self-described “musical soul mates,” Karl Briedrick and Marie-Claire Balabanian of Speck Mountain prefer to call their music “ambient soul” which is fair enough, but they are leaving out the “subtle beauty” that protrudes.

Although Future Clouds and Radar evoke two words that are plain annoying – “beatlesque and power pop" –    the Austin outfit’s 2007 self –titled two disc debut, won over many new fans and even went so far as to be named fourth best album of the year by Harp Magazine.   Their follow-up, Peoria, is a tight eight song 35 minute affair, and while not as grandiose as its predecessor, this one still finds the band enrolled at Beatles U.

Get Guilty, Newman’s second solo album following 2004’s Small Wonder, is less versatile than any of his New Porn releases, but grows on you more rewardingly.  Mixing simple lush compositions with the typical he/she vocals we’ve grown accustomed to from the lispy voiced composer, there’s a lot going on here.  

David Byrne has been known to reinvent himself through various artistic mediums, so  it was no surprise that he recently decided to recharge his creative battery by reconvening with Brian Eno.  Byrne/Eno of course are  renowned for their work on early Talking Heads albums and 1981’s landmark electronica/ambient album – My Life in The Bush of Ghosts.

Despite the fact that AC/DC is considered classic rock , their relevancy in 2008 couldn’t have been more obvious by the deep lines at their merch booth tables within the arena. With mullett heads lined up next to the trendy set and almost a 2 to 1 girl to guy ratio, there wasn’t a genre of fan who couldn’t wait to sport the AC/DC logo on a t-shirt.   A