With a careful editing eye and a reinvestment in the tools that made him so innovative as a male singer-songwriter, Howie Day can really go far again, despite the many blunders of recent memory.
Matthew Ryan’s 13th album, I Recall Standing As Though Nothing Could Fall (2011) continues to genre define, while evolving with the spare music accompaniment that accompanies Ryan’s raw lyrics. Ryan said it best about his lyrical motivations in this interview with Glide – “I’m just documenting the life and observations of a fairly intelligent human that has a stubborn belief that we’re capable of so much more.”
Alex Schaaf recorded his debut album, The Mistress, alone in his Wisconsin bedroom. Under the moniker Yellow Ostrich, Schaaf’s music has the intimate feeling of poetry reverberating off the four walls of his confined space. The minimalist song structures use instruments to fill in gaps in the open-ended tracks. An occasional thud of a kick drum or piano chord have a jarring effect, seeming out of place with the flowing vocal melodies, but it is those vocals that provide the meat of the album.
Taj Mahal Trio @ Brooklyn Bowl, Sept. 20 Photo and Words: Grace Beehler With a 50-year musical career under his belt, Taj Mahal and his band – Kester Smith on
Sipping a cold beer and enjoying a Mike Gordon show at the Paradise in Boston in 2010, I had to scratch my head when Mike leaned into the audience and passed a young lady a small square device. After a moment of pointing and perhaps a word or two of instruction, a new groove blared from the stage and the band kept turning on a dime as the sounds continued to shift.
I turned to someone nearby and asked, “What the heck is that?” He nonchalantly answered, “Oh, that’s just Mike’s Kaossilator.” Curious when that was, I went home and Googled it and ended up buying one a few weeks later.
So what exactly is a Kaossilator and what can it do?
READ ON for more on the Kaossilator…
Trey Anastasio’s first solo show of the season took place at Higher Ground in South Burlington, Vermont on Saturday night and as of press time no audience recordings have surfaced.
Of the 25+ songs Sting performed from throughout his career at Saturday’s 60th birthday bash, The Police classic Demolition Man was nowhere to be found. The man born as Gordon
We keep our eyes peeled for new tour dates announcements each week and compile them on Tuesdays for this handy column… Last year, former Pink Floyd bassist Roger Waters celebrated
The Jimi Hendrix Experience Winterland single CD, just released by Legacy Recordings through its affiliation with Experience Hendrix, is not the same music as originally put out through RykoDisc in 1987. It is, instead, a distillation of the four CD deluxe package available the same day as this new release, which is, in turn, a condensed representation of recordings made over three nights in October of 1968 at the now defunct San Francisco venue once overseen by the late impresario extraordinaire Bill Graham.
While they could continue to deliver solid sets of songs constructed in their conventional paradigm, their willingness to experiment and travel in new directions with their latest record– and do so successfully– both reinvigorates their catalogue and shows that they still have plenty to say, and it’s worth listening in.
