Posts by Steve Ovadia

Lonesome Shack is high-concept. They’re a Seattle band led by guitarist Ben Todd, who, the story goes, spent time in a shack in the New Mexico desert, learning traditional blues and bluegrass licks, as so many of us have. The band now operates out of London. And that story explains their sound. It’s blues and […]

Bluesman John Mayall is perhaps best known for his ear for talent. Legendary guitarists Eric Clapton, Peter Green, and Mick Taylor, all passed through his bands, not to mention Cream bassist Jack Bruce and the Fleetwood Mac rhythm section. Plus more modern guitar marvels like Harvey Mandel and Coco Montoya. But Mayall is more than […]

The easiest way to explain Drenge’s Strange Creatures is to use “When I Look Into Your Eyes,” the closing track, as a microcosm of the entire album. The bones of the song are simple. Even mundane. It’s a basic acoustic strum, a pretty sing-song melody, and a beat anyone could clap. But in the hands […]

Ryan Bingham has a distinctive voice. It has an underlying weariness like maybe he spent the previous night trying to be heard in a loud room, but it also has an electric resonance, like he’s somehow able to amplify himself without the need for electronics. That kind of immediately-recognizable vocal character can become a prison […]

As I write this, the sports talk world is consumed by pitcher Mariano Rivera’s unanimous induction into the baseball Hall of Fame. Rivera was perhaps the greatest closer baseball will ever know. When he pitched at the end of the game, everyone knew he would throw his cutter, but knowing what was coming didn’t matter, […]

This writer saw Bob Mould play a solo show in the winter of 2017 in the immediate aftermath of a New York City blizzard. The weather was no issue for the pride of Minneapolis. He walked up onto an empty stage, electric guitar case in hand. He took out the guitar, strapped it on, plugged […]

[rating=7.00] The Reverend Horton Heat loomed large for this reviewer in the 90s who was a huge fan of 1994’s Al Jourgensen-produced Liquor in the Front, but never felt the need to listen to more of the band’s psychobilly work. So I was excited to see the band is still around, making new music. Whole […]

[rating=8.00] In their prime, the Beach Boys were two separate bands. One band was led by Brian Wilson, studio scientists pushing the limits and expectations of what pop music could be. The other band toured, playing incredibly simplified, stripped down versions of what the studio band had created. Personnel overlapped between the two groups, but […]

[rating=9.00] The best blues songs have an element of danger like they’re going to fall apart at any moment. It’s a feeling not unlike building Ikea furniture while drunk. Cedric Burnside’s Benton County Relic taps into that invigorating feeling of falling, perfectly slowing the beat of songs to create huge grooves and using raw guitar […]

[rating=9.00] Back in 2013, Karl Urban and Michael Ealy starred in Almost Human, a science fiction buddy cop/police procedural network series set in the future. The show centered around Urban as a human cop and Ealy as his android partner. The tension of the canceled-too-early series was that Ealy seems to be sentient and in […]

It’s easy to mistake Shlomo Franklin for a farmer. There’s the plain, unmarked baseball cap, the earnest face, and an overall look of youthful single-mindedness and purpose that one associates with small family farmers in John Mellencamp songs. But mostly it’s the overalls that read agriculturally. But Franklin isn’t a farmer. He’s a brilliant singer-songwriter. […]

Facebook’s recent advertising campaign is all about, among other things, how fake Facebook accounts aren’t really our friends. But it’s depressing that we’re even at the point where we need an advertising campaign to help people understand what constitutes a friend. The idea of friendship is one of many things that makes Something Smells Funky […]

[rating=9.00] Music isn’t just about sound. It’s also location-based. Beloved songs are often beloved, not just because of the music, but because of the memory associated with the music. Where you are when you hear something impacts how you feel about what you hear. So consider that Giulia Millanta’s beautiful, Conversation with a Ghost was […]

[rating=9.00] Bluegrass isn’t a new musical genre, but the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack, part of the 2000 film, gave it a very grand, very specific, relatively mainstream moment, that eventually passed. Sure, there have been some subsequent moments where aspects of bluegrass have bubbled back into popular culture. Swedish DJ Avicii’s huge hit, […]

[rating=9.00] It’s not exactly a nice feeling when an album reminds you that you’re a bit of a sexist, but it’s an important one to acknowledge. Because if you’re anything like this reviewer, you’re going to hear some pretty amazing slide guitar on Kara Grainger’s Living With Your Ghost, and you’re going to wonder who’s […]

[rating=9.00] Parker Millsap’s Other Arrangements shows an evolution in sound and songwriting that’s made all the more interesting by the fact that it was crafted on the road. Faced with the challenge of following up his successful The Very Last Day, and working under less-than-ideal circumstances, he could have played it safe and delivered a […]