It is rare to hear an album that’s different than most anything else one’s heard in quite some time. It is also rare to find one so different it both falls into that category and is enjoyable. Unfortunately, Deerhoof’s “Offend Maggie” fails to surpass that relatively high bar.
When Justin Vernon speaks these days, people line up to listen at every corner. It wasn’t always this way for Vernon, who now records under the name Bon Iver. You know him because of his beautiful For Emma, Forever Ago, a record that everyone seemed to love because of its cold truth—that pain is somehow always around us.
Marco Benevento’s second studio release in less than a year comes on the heels of his critically acclaimed LP, Invisible Baby. Me Not Me, a series of interpretive covers with three originals sprinkled in, is a natural extension of his last album, focused on layered, dissonant sound-sculpting, while beautiful piano leads carry the melody. Featuring diverse artists such as My Morning Jacket, Deerhoof, Leonard Cohen, and Led Zeppelin, Benevento has incorporated some of his favorite songs into his own musical milieu.
Following up the soulful, boogie-rock of their last album “Armed Love,” The International Noise Conspiracy pick up where they left off with The Cross of My Calling. This time around they are opting for a slightly more psychedelic rock sound.
Tommy Keene is one of America's two great practitioners of power pop along with Matthew Sweet. Yet while the latter, as befits his name, anticipates the best is yet to come, there's an ironic contrast with Keene’s moniker: his tunes carry an ever so slight but nevertheless palpable air of melancholy.
2008 was quite a year for artistic revival. Portishead remerged from a 10-year hiatus to create an album wholly beyond themselves. Mickey Rourke overcame a bruised reputation to achieve an incredible portrayal of, well, himself. Now, it appears that Georgia-based southern rockers Bloodkin have set the benchmark for artistic rediscovery in 2009.
"The Wrestler" is the bonus track on Springsteen's latest album, Working on a Dream. It's a honest tale set to poignant music. It connects in the way we expect Springsteen to connect. However, it is appropriately labeled as bonus material, because it really doesn't fit the rest of the album.
Although Future Clouds and Radar evoke two words that are plain annoying – “beatlesque and power pop" – the Austin outfit’s 2007 self –titled two disc debut, won over many new fans and even went so far as to be named fourth best album of the year by Harp Magazine. Their follow-up, Peoria, is a tight eight song 35 minute affair, and while not as grandiose as its predecessor, this one still finds the band enrolled at Beatles U.
Get Guilty, Newman’s second solo album following 2004’s Small Wonder, is less versatile than any of his New Porn releases, but grows on you more rewardingly. Mixing simple lush compositions with the typical he/she vocals we’ve grown accustomed to from the lispy voiced composer, there’s a lot going on here.
The Collector’s Edition of Warren Zevon's debut album has all the pristine clarity of most 70's California rock. But the shadowy blue tones of the front-cover photograph suggest how deceptively arresting the music is inside.
