The second album in a triptych that includes My Aim is True and Armed Forces, This Year’s Model is now available in a deluxe two-Dd edition, compiling the various b-sides and singles Costello released around this time, as well as a full concert from 1978 with his band The Attractions,
In late 2006, Lost Highway Records dropped Tift Merritt. Her final album with the label, Tambourine, garnered a Grammy nomination and general high praise, but it left Merritt as an independent musician. Clueless by the decision and tapped of her energy, Merritt, who had been living in Paris at the time, still felt one thing to be true: her songs that would eventually become her third album, Another Country, would win out.
Ceilings is an album that relies more on piano and layers of ambient noise than it does on the brash guitar, bass and drums of a typical rock band. The first reaction is that they've tapped into OK Computer-era Radiohead, but the deeper influence is perhaps The Church who created a similar ebb and flow of soothing yet moving noise surrounding an almost folky organic center.
Call Warpaint a comeback, but The Black Crowes have proven that their best original music wasn’t just a thing of the past.
“I want to make an impact, I want to make a difference,” Jessica Sonner sings on the title track of her first album, All We Need. At this point in her young career as a singer-songwriter, Sonner is a little bit of everything. And on All We Need, all the goods are on display, and with good reason.
n today’s world of indie rock Harley Davidsons, Cryptacize is a tricycle, albeit one pimped out with cherry red paint and chrome that shines on the cloudiest of days.
or those fans who loved Dr. Dog’s throwback sound, with last years We All Belong, this years retro-style-indie-rock-almost-hippie release from the Hymns, Travel in Herds will be a warm sunbeam fighting back a cruel winter. There’s a down home vibe to the tunes contained on Travel in Herds and it stems straight out of seventies folk-rock.
Air Traffic have revealed that their music “sounds like nobody else,” which might be the case if Snow Patrol, Coldplay and Keane were still playing the pub circuit. Air Traffic’s debut album, Fractured Life, which was released last summer in England before its February American release, gives the listeners more of what we’ve heard before in reference to the above mentioned bands.
Singer-songwriter Jacob Golden has unleashed his stash of break-up songs, and it appears his heart is still aching. The 11 sad tunes that make up Revenge Songs, Golden’s mighty debut, cover a lot of ground, but mostly lament on a relationship that’s “not around anymore.” And that’s putting it lightly.
he discovery of an abandoned boom box on a city street would be expected to spew the visceral beats that Rafter creates, his low-fi in approach oddly animated in presence, but infectious none-the-less.
