Baseball and rock music make for great debate, so why not combine the two? Such has been the ethos of The Baseball Project; a whimsical collaboration between Steve Wynn, Peter Buck, Scott McCaughey, and Linda Pitmon.
Birds of Avalon must be one of the few touring bands that sports a dueling, husband and wife guitar attack. Paul Siler and Cheetie Jumar’s churning, melodic and quirky axe work propels the LP forward alongside a vibe that mixes melodically rhythmic bass patterns, Merseybeat’s steady, thunder pop drumming and pleasantly spacey vocals.
On his fourth album, Mission Bell, Amos Lee decided to take his time to get it right. Though the previous two releases weren’t bad, Lee admits that they were rushed and were easily lost among a myriad of rootsy singers strumming an acoustic guitar. The result of that deliberation could be a career-defining album.
On Hardcore Will Never Die But You Will, as was the case on earlier albums and more recently on 2008’s brilliant and often under-appreciated The Hawk Is Howling, Scottish rock outfit Mogwai knows how to set a mood early and occasionally explode from that jumping off point. With a bit more texture in spots a la The Cure-meets-Coldplay which fuels “White Noise” (and later during “Letters To The Metro”) Mogwai settle things down with a decent if not delectable “Mexican Grand Prix” with, dare I say it, vocals?
Where previous releases found the band plodding along with ten to twelve minute meditations about murderous butchers, mysterious fowl, and shape-shifting lovers, The King Is Dead hearkens back to the earlier days of the band where Colin Meloy and company littered albums like Castaways and Cutouts with compact, yet charitably worded, pastoral folk rock. Boosted with appearances by alt-country superstars Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, and graced with guitar stylings courtesy of the legendary Peter Buck, this album gallops along like a pleasant country breeze, projecting an aura of calmness and satisfaction and providing a concise rejoinder to the stylized grandeur of releases like The Tain EP and The Hazards of Love.
Since the release of his highly acclaimed 2005 album, Live at Stubb’s, Matisyahu has grown as a singer, songwriter, artist and beat box virtuoso. So when Matisyahu returned to Austin, Texas last August it was somewhat of a homecoming. Stubb’s [Volume I] was a defining album that separated critics and identified his voice in a music community that, at the time, did not have a Hasidic reggae rapper-singer-songwriter present.
Live Forever is the 40th posthumous Bob Marley-related release. Fortunately, it’s one of the better efforts, thanks to generally pristine audio quality and the significance of the show itself – Marley’s final concert, in which nearly all his utterances seem imbued with a prophetic quality.
It’d be easy to file Let England Shake as a political missive—an accessible but dense album of musings about the state of our world through the lens of Harvey’s home country England. Yet, PJ Harvey’s continual (and in many ways insatiable) desire to reinvent both her persona and music make classifications exceedingly difficult. She does not seek to push the limits of her catalog but wholly redefine it, experimenting with vocal techniques, varied instrumentation or poetic structures that both destabilize her oeuvre while creating new spaces in which to exist.
One can’t help but wonder if this is John McCrea circa 2010, looking back on his band’s heyday and comparing the earlier glory to the difficult task ahead of starting over, attempting to acquire a new audience while at the same time inspiring a new group of fans who may have missed Cake’s previous chart-topping run of hits. Like the syndicated sitcoms, Cake may not be must-see TV, but they are good enough to get you through the evening.
Social D ‘aint changing for nobody. Rocking the soul country punk since the Carter administration, Mike Ness and the boys return for the first time since 2004 with Hard Times and Nursery Rhymes. Storming out of the gates with the instrumental “Road Zombie”, the band declares their intention to pick up exactly where they left off – chunky power chords remain front and center and the pounding, punchy drums thrash on.
