Album Reviews

As stated in another outlet the first time this writer saw Chris Stapleton live was in a hotel room for a radio taping with his then band, The SteelDrivers, a dozen years ago. Drawn to his soulful voice, I had a feeling that he was destined for bigger things or at least a solo breakout. […]

Singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Randall Bramblett remains for far too many an under the radar artist, even after making, with Pine Needle Fire (New West), his twelfth studio album. In addition to his stellar solo work, over his four decades career he has performed and composed alongside Traffic, Steve Winwood, The Allman Brothers, The Band’s Levon […]

Perhaps one of the coolest yet low key collaborations to ever take place was that between Congolese vocalist/composer Bony Bikaye, French musician/producer Hector Zazou, and modular synth group CY1. First teaming up in 1983 for Noir et Blanc, this unlikely trio of talented acts created a sound that seamlessly merged Afrobeat, Afrofunk, bouncy synth-pop, and early electronic dance music […]

The ever-prolific guitarist Nels Cline is back with his avant-garde aggregation, the Nels Cline Singers, for their seventh recording, first as a band and Cline’s third with the Blue Note label. You know Cline by now, as the guitarist for Wilco, and one who has appeared on over 200 recordings and over 30 as a […]

When one sees the words ‘Chicago’ and ‘blues’ the natural tendency is to think of electric 12-bar Chicago blues but veteran singer-songwriter Mike Felten brings a more eclectic mix that owes to folk and rock as well. In fact, most of Felten’s blues are acoustically based, rather than electric, but yes, he employs many standard […]

The reunion may be short lived, in more ways than one, but it’s a stunning reminder of what System of a Down has always done best.

Tennessee Jet is what happens when a kid is raised on both Outlaw Country and Nirvana.  On his third effort, The Country, Tennessee Jet lays out a strong Americana/Outlaw Country-inspired collection of songs that have just enough bite at the core to let you know he probably has a lot of punk records in his […]

It’s more than a little fitting that Neil Young chooses to revisit his Greendale project right around the 2020 presidential election. The themes he pursued in the original 2003 album, in all its various formats, are not only right in line with the socially-conscious approach he’s maintained in recent years, but also reflect more widespread […]

Athens, GA-based four piece Pylon certainly had the songs and creativity to match the commercial success of scene mates like R.E.M. and the B-52s throughout the 1980s, but for whatever reason they were constantly overlooked by the mass record buying public. Part of the problem was the fact that executives from major labels, on their […]

Honey Made is a soul and funk band from Austin that has shared the stage with George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic and Lee Fields among others.  Brand New is the band’s first full-length album and was produced by Steve Berlin, who insisted the band record at Texas Treefort Studios in Austin. Of the new album, […]

As the music business evolves, musicians have to find new ways to adapt. It used to be that an artist would go into a studio and record an album. Not to say that albums are passe, but music fans have gravitated away from listening to albums. One artist who has adapted to the new style […]

Jupiter Conjunct is saxophonist/composer Aaron Burnett & The Big Machine follow-up to 2019’s acclaimed Anomaly, this time moving into the extra-terrestrial as many jazz forbears such as Sun Ra, John and Alice Coltrane, Pharaoh Sanders, and Lonnie Liston Smith, among others have done. We do have modern-day purveyors too such as The Comet Is Coming.  […]

It should perhaps come as no surprise that the two preeminent jazz pianists of our time have both released albums based on their quarantine during the COVID19 pandemic. Brad Mehldau’s Suite: April 2020  is something of a tabula rasa of the brilliant musician’s original material upon which he tacitly encourages listeners to project their own […]

With acclaimed tenor saxophonist/ EWI player Bob Mintzer doubling as a member of the four decades standing Yellow Jackets (of which he is a three decade member) and as conductor of the superb WDR Big Band of Cologne, Germany since 2016, there was perhaps an inevitability of this recording. We have seen Mintzer expand the […]

In this year of Charlie Parker’s Centennial there have been multiple events, tribute recordings and various nods to the iconic “Bird” a as he is most popularly known. Craft Recordings now releases the compact disc edition of The Savoy 10-Inch LP Collection, which spotlights Charlie Parker’s groundbreaking bebop sessions for the legendary jazz label (spanning 1944 to […]

Music history is littered with under-appreciated, undervalued and under the radar artists who could have been, might have been, should have been a bigger deal. Going by decades, one of the most obvious examples from the 1970s is Van Duren. A Memphis-based musician and bandmate of post-Big Star’s Chris Bell and Jody Stephens in the […]

In 2017, Midnight Oil returned from its lengthy hiatus with a vengeance, traversing the globe on The Great Circle Tour, rousing audiences, and raising consciousness along the way. In keeping with that extended effort, and in follow-up to the live content released in the wake of those efforts, Armistice Day, this powerhouse outfit from Down […]

Puscifer has always been the hardest of Maynard James Keenan’s nuts to crack. It’s a joke, but it’s completely serious. It’s a solo project, but it’s a group effort. It’s different from any of his other works, but it’s the same. Dichotomy and duality have always been part of the game when it comes to […]

Austin Lucas certainly wasn’t the first punk rock kid to put away the distortion pedal and pick up an acoustic guitar, leaning more into country and folk influences. But he’s always been among the most consistently solid. His latest, Alive In The Hot Zone, continues that streak. Written and recorded in the early weeks of […]

Life is full of happy accidents. One of those is how Chamomile and Whiskey came up with its name. One night Marie Borgman and Koda Kerl mixed Evan Williams with chamomile tea. It sounds like a remedy your grandparents might have prescribed when you were a bit under the weather. The pair decided that the […]