Fans of down-tempo piano electronica, trip-hop and dream pop will dig this, and if you want to get hip to an unsigned artist who is about to blow up on the dance scene, then you owe it to yourself to check out Mimi Page’s work.
For the past several months, The Kinks have been in celebratory mode as many of their albums are being re-released in the deluxe format that has been all the rage amongst record companies of late. The latest installment here presents three of the band’s strongest ‘60’s releases into a repackaged format: 1966’s Face to Face, 1967’s Something Else, and 1969’s Arthur.
If her muse is a reflection leading towards her inner self, then Sarah Jarosz is an artist who has found her voice and fully brought it into life.
Frustrating, then, is Holland’s newest work, Pint of Blood. So much of the raw building blocks are present for this to be a superb record. Holland’s voice is in fine form, gliding between thoughts and words, melisma intact, bending and caressing notes to forge them into wholly new beings and shapes. But these songs feel emptier and more hollow than Holland’s previous work.
The Globes are from Spokane, WA, not usually thought of as a hotbed for fruitful musical collaboration. Young, having graduated from high school in 2007, band members dedicated themselves to pursuing a musical vision that first expanded into a seven piece orchestral and cinematic unit before contacting to the current quartet. Future Self is their first release and retains a certain murky drama that is both musically complex and emotionally accessible.
Few artists have achieved the type of glowing recognition in such a short period of time as has Justin Vernon over the past three years. By now, his back story
The husband-wife duo comprising Handsome Furs have managed to cultivate an exclusive sound for themselves, and instead of going haywire, they have stuck to it with a mature songwriting craft, experimenting with textures and noise fittingly. While the sound itself may be a hit-or-miss, depending on taste, it remains admirable that Sound Kapital has that inimitably honest quality throughout its duration; the quality of conviction.
Disappear is a soundtrack for purposeful living in an often seemingly purposeless world. Jared Falcon’s songs, discovered on cassettes in a storage locker in 1988 after he was institutionalized, inspired singer-songwriter Neil Rosen (vocals, guitar) and his friend/band mate Shannon Ferguson (lead guitar) to record their junior-high school chum’s compositions.
While this initial edition of Peter Case’s archival efforts contains its share of the sharp contemporary folk (“Steel Strings #1”) and blues (“(Give Me) One More Mile”) that dominate his live shows these days, the greater portion of The Case Files demonstrates the genuine rock and roll swagger that Case first displayed with The Plimsouls (and still does when they reunite).
Rootdown’s latest CD is a bit of a departure from their previous releases—but only slightly—as the sound is more mature as is some of the content. This is after all the band who has sung about the beach, flip flops and their love of the Oregon Mexican food chain Burrito Boy on previous releases.
