Album Reviews

[rating=7.00] When Dave Lamb of Brown Bird passed away in 2014, the loss felt so great and the future of the band felt so uncertain. Lamb’s bandmate and wife Morgan Eve Swain, finding herself a young widow, had to reassess and grieve. Brown Bird was a prominent fixture not just in the Providence, Rhode Island […]

[rating=6.00] Anyone lucky enough to bear witness to the beautiful, booze-fueled carnage that is a Waco Brothers concert can attest to frontman Jon Langford’s charismatic and ever unpredictable stage presence. Aside from giving notoriously uninhibited live performances, “bad luck Jonathan” is also an accomplished visual artist (his work appearing everywhere from the Country Music Hall […]

[rating=7.00] Emily Haines isn’t the type to give anything away. With a career that includes such diverse ensembles as Metric and Broken Social Scene, the only consistency that can be counted on is her interest in adventure. After all, her  two previous solo outings — Her 2006 full length release Knives Don’t Have Your Back and the 2007 […]

[rating=7.00] If it seems implausible that Waitin’ For the Sun is Rusty Young’s first-ever solo album, it’s well to keep in mind his long-term role in the seminal country-rock band Poco. His  innovative steel guitar playing, not to mention his vocal harmonies, highlighted the group’s sound from its 1968 inception through the 1973 departure of […]

[rating=7.00] For Toadies’ seventh studio album, the Fort Worth quartet went into the studio without a plan, coming up with songs as they went with no roadmap in terms of the sonic terrain they wanted to cover. The resulting album, The Lower Side of Uptown, is a departure from the softer, more subdued aesthetic the […]

[rating=8.00] Lee Ranaldo has moved on (even dropping The Dust moniker) from his smoothly polished 2013 release Last Night on Earth to Electric Trim. This release is a quirky mix of Beatles inspired experimental pop that hints at something lurking just at the edges. Opening with an enigma of a track that feels stapled together, […]

[rating=7.00] With Ghost Gardens, Elliott BROOD continues to experiment with the myriad styles within its eclectic sound. This fifth album from the Canadian trio is a complex layering and melding of country, bluegrass, folk, and rock to form a musical tapestry that is equally beautiful and bleak. The album-opening “’Til the Sun Comes Up Again” […]

[rating=5.00] Prophets of Rage is a supergroup for our current times that is not designed to heal our country but fight the powers that be. They have a clearly defined agenda lyrically, laid out to battle the current establishments policies in front of metal injected hip-hop riffs and beats. In a vacuum the combination of Chuck […]

Grace Potter’s Grand Point North Festival is celebrating its seventh year in 2017, but if there was a nagging predictability or any sense of lack of imagination in the presentation in general, such negativism dissipated in the high barometric pressure that brought mid-July weather to mid-September at Burlington’s Waterfront Park. Temperatures in the eighties and […]

[rating=8.00] Ariel Pink, like his music, is a curious swirl of fantasy, existentialism, and abounding magnetism. Dedicated to Bobby Jameson is Pink’s first solo album since 2014’s pom pom, and his trademark lo-fi sound, while present on the album, continues to get stretched and reinvented throughout. The 13-track effort’s title is an ode to a […]