Album Reviews

Merging the shuffling, lead-footed tales of the red-clay south with progressive songwriting and intricate, modern composition, Tony Furtado has joined peers like Kelly Joe Phelps as a new traditionalist genre bender of the finger-picked Delta blues style.

Some Cities holds an obvious departure from their prior two epic releases, as the eleven songs feature more live arrangements verse the overdub experiments of Doves past. Songs rooted in soul that haven’t been presented in Doves studio efforts illustrate a ray of country sun over their gray Manchester landscape.

Can you imagine Louis XIV going on tour with Ween? That would be as politically incorrect a duo as Larry The Cable Guy and Al Franken. On their new CD, The Best Little Secrets Are Kept, Louis XIV is more sexed up than Howard Stern interviewing Jenna Jameson at the Adult Video Awards.

It wouldn

Somewhere between The Chemical Brothers and the Pet Shop Boys, Fischerspooner interweave themselves within the Williamsburg art scene with robotic art-pop and ironic techno-melodrama.

While the occasionally fuzzy guitars and heavy drumming on Earlimart

The “big break” for indie artists these days many times seems to happen after a feature in a Volkswagen commercial or other equivalent hipster car ad.

Handclaps collide with raunchy guitars and surfboard vocals to create nothing less than a beach party for hippies, mod rockers, and emo kids wearing Chucks. Its pure Subpop.

Boston

What

After three very strong EPs that were only available online, Ben Folds follows up with a full release that sounds like he put his old band back together, but he hasn

After selling 12 million albums since their debut in 2000, 3 Doors Down releases their third, Seventeen Days.

Questions loses points for its mildly unoriginal content, considering Us3 were once breakthrough pioneers, the 14 track album mirrors different snippets in the soul/funk/R&B hits of the past decade – including of course two more “Cantaloop” remixes.

The third soundtrack in a surfing inspired film series which includes both “Thicker Than Water” and “September Sessions,

This time around, she may offer a few more casual, 70s radio rockers than normal, but there is still enough of her signature, heroin drone ballads meandering along to give it that eerie comfort she effortlessly creates.

Strangers is familiar, like bumping into an acquaintance you haven

A collection of mostly forgettable songs with their hearts in the right place, Twilight Tales from the Prairies of the Sun suffers from sounding like bit of everything without ever finding substance.

One of the best things about the funk-tastic Boston quintet No Bud for Bisson (NBFB) is that it

Break out the wife beater and grab a cold one! Queens of the Stone Age have returned with another pack of their desert stoner peyote boogie go-go rock.

Murdocks sound like any Strokes, Hot Hot Heat, or Kaiser Chiefs already out there, but their brand of chaos trembles with a vital sense of urgency and aggression that demands to at least be heard, obeyed and absorbed.