Album Reviews

Atmosphere made a good album in You Can’t Imagine How Much Fun We’re Having. Filled with solid beats, sultry samples and a thriving musical relationship between Ant and Slug, the album proves to be Atmosphere’s most impressive recording to date, helping place Minneapolis and the rest of the Midwest on the musical map.

What Echo & The Bunnymen have created in Siberia is a rare piece of work

Kicking Television, recorded live at the Vic Theatre in Chicago, May 4-7, 2005, captures Wilco in the new Nels Cline/Pat Sansone/Mikael Jorgensen era, complete with sonic splashes, textured keyboards and disgruntled guitars to accompany Jeff Tweedy

Matt Pond PA are a consistent band. And when it comes to music, consistency can be both good and bad. It seems you know a new MP album will drop every year and this is the fifth from the band in the past five years. You know the quartet will have catchy melodies,
lovesick lyrics and usually some beautiful album art. Now centrally located in Brooklyn after leaving the brotherly confines of Philadelphia, not much has changed on Several Arrows Later.

This is one of those that albums that forces you to listen and listen again, yet the sounds fend off any coalescing ideas. And it’s this uneven quality that draws me back time and time again, that glimmer of greatness that is elusive.

This oldie comes packaged as a remastered CD and DVD Audio release with extensive liner notes and video bonuses including a

Garcia Plays Dylan doesn’t have the completeness factor of this year’s other marvelous Jerry Garcia estate releases–but it adds another dimension and a different sort of thoroughness those releases can’t, by nature, explore: the connection between two storied musicians as exemplified by one’s tackling of the other’s material in a variety of contexts.

Earl Klugh

The tunes can stir something deep, but that passion comes from a dirty section of your mind.

Whether you call it underground, intelligent or backpacker it

Just in time for winter, the Icelandic super-elves Sigur Ros deliver another perfectly crystallized sonic poem evoking their sparkling quicksilver home in the stars. Takk

Joy Electric

You may get The Mars Volta

The influences of Queen and the rage of punk are undeniable, yet Emery has emerged with a distinctive raw, edgy footprint of its own.

If The Art of Virtue is any indication, Adrienne Young lives by Ben Franklin

Taking nods from My Bloody Valentine, Syd Barrett and Eno might be making for a monumental listen, but for Animal Collective, Feels is just another commitment to studio experimentation for an art rock band.

Like a lot of electronic and instrumental music, Cubik & Origami

Led by lead singer Ashlin Phillips, who immediately evokes comparisons to Rilo Kiley

Where the first Castanets record Cathedral was a true Americana record, First Light

While Permission to Land’s overall awesomeness is questionable, their new album One Way Ticket to Hell