Album Reviews

It

For the better part of ten years, Calexico has sounded like no other experimental rock outfit. Where else can you hear mariachi singers, marimbas and happy trumpets with shades of highway Americana? Recently reaching the Billboard 200 album chart with their 2005 In the Reins collaboration with Iron & Wine, Calexico

Black Wire posted a statement online that it doesn’t need a drummer

This four piece band from New Jersey has produced a high impact album, full of hard driving rock and roll, right alongside ambient jams and funky jazz numbers.

The one-man minstrel Keller Williams has teamed up with his good friends Larry and Jenny Keel to release Grass, a fun loving and light-hearted album that features their fine collaborative cohesion. This album is humorous, easily digestible, and just plain old fun listening. Although this album is not going to be winning any Grammy awards for best album, its selection of choice originals and reworked covers are well worth the price.

Box is an audacious debut from a band and Bates, who will continue to cultivate his aural inclinations into unexpected directions.

The Hidden Land drops in advance of a major year of touring for our beloved Flecktones, who didn’t perform together in 2005 but certainly found ways to occupy themselves, with all four members mounting successful side project jaunts. Hidden isn’t so much a comeback, as some observers have oddly termed it, but rather just picking up where they left off, possibly with a renewed sense of purpose and a sensibility that seems a bit more earthbound.

Side projects have become a hit or miss avenue. For every novel Postal Service, there is an over-hyped Velvet Revolver with the whole

Rocky Votolato shouldn’t be written off when if comes to earnest
folk music, but most of the album is banal with not enough distinction
between the songs. He is a fine songwriter and musician, but his music
doesn’t burst to life like some of his more refined predecessors.

With “Goodnight and Go,” you get a bubblegum teen romp with silly lyrics and a chorus that sounds so immature, it might make Britney puke when she hears it.

Compared to tracks like “The Day We Left Town,” from his first album, Johansen is capable of much more dark drama than is present on Tourniquet. The dreamlike quality here conjures up nothing more foreboding than visions of scarves billowing in slow motion.

This will be the album that will have longtime fans of the Devics bragging to newcomers that they liked them before they got popular, and have the Johnny-come-latelys scrambling to find their entire back catalog.

In this mystery meat pot-roast of goth-industrial-futurepop sub-Bjorkings, Ex-Swan Jarboe presents the most hiply presentable slices of her life over the past six years

The newest six-song, self-titled EP from Lisa Jackson & Girl Friday is stark, powerful and provocative. It lacks studio glitz and a perfect vocal performance, yet that may just be what gives it such personality and edge.

Ask yourself–do you like Belgian indie-pop? Not a question most people can readily answer off the top of their head, but that is Girls In Hawaii–who are actually guys. Confused yet?

Dates and times may be arbitrary human attempts to impose order amid the chaos, but the precision with which musical fads shift every time the ball drops can

Truth is that there is nothing as complex as the teenage mind to be had on The Subway’s Young for Eternity, just a teenager screaming as loud as he can over second-hand riffs. Corporate synergy once again fails. The one positive thing Young for Eternity might accomplish is that the pre-teens who purchase it may find this as dreadful as I did and learn that they can

By now you

The music itself is a regurgitation of jerky, sampled electronic beats and attempted Eminem-style delivery with absolutely no flow.

The Midwestern modesty could be taken as part of Midstates