While the future of Gorillaz may be unclear, the band is still putting out product. On Monday the animated act put an iPad app up for sale through iTunes called
As Pearl Jam continues to celebrates its 20th anniversary in 2011, the seminal Seattle rock band’s lead singer, Eddie Vedder, has announced plans to release a new solo album and
A few weeks back I headed over to influential music website Daytrotter, and decided to mine their vast archives of fantastic in-studio recordings from a veritable who’s who of indie-rock
As we previously mentioned, venerable indie-jam rockers moe. are in the midst of celebrating their 20th anniversary this year. As part of this year-long festivities, the band will release their
It’s going to be a good Spring if you’re a fan of the music of John Prine as you’ll be able to enjoy the legendary singer-songwriters music in two very
As part of the April issue of Esquire, the almost 80 year-old men’s culture magazine asked five singer-songwriters to take part in their Esquire Songwriting Challenge by inviting them to
When uber-producer Rick Rubin first started working with Johnny Cash in the mid-’90s the country legend’s career was in a bit of a lull. The pair’s first album together, American
This year at Hidden Track, we concocted a little experiment for our year-end Best Albums of 2009 list. Instead of picking the old fashioned way – subjectively – we opted for something a little different: a collaborative, collective list that incorporates the opinions of everybody here at HT.
To begin, we devised an all-encompassing list of around 100 nominees and populated it in a Google spreadsheet – essentially anything that anybody who writes for Hidden Track liked at all, made the list. Then we invited our crew of writers to independently vote on the whole list (omitting anything unfamiliar) on a scale of 1 to 20 (20 = five stars). We ended up with 33 voters with varying degrees of familiarity with the nominees; some folks voted on just about everything, while some just a few. From there, we eliminated anything that did not receive at least three votes, calculated the average scores, and sorted it. We took the top 25 scores and presto: the Hidden Track 25 Best Albums of 2009. No bullshit, no big opinions; just the results.
Let’s check out numbers 20 through 16 and see what made the cut…
20) Dirty Projectors – Bitte Orca
Key Tracks: Stillness Is The Move, Useful Chamber, Two Doves
Sounds Like: Art Rock for people that like Folk Rock, Talking Heads
Skinny: Is it possible that The Dirty Projectors made an art-rock jamband album? With just nine tracks, Bitte Orca covers a lot of ground with a handful of songs that wind their way past the five minute mark – employing schizophrenic twist and turns that include sharp tempo changes, odd time signatures and everything from hand claps to harpsichords. The band has also impressed the likes of David Byrne – who recorded a song with them for the Dark Was The Night compilation – and The Roots who jammed with them at show at Bowery Ballroom shortly after they appeared on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon.
READ ON for the next four albums in our week long countdown…
There really has been no shortage of Bob Dylan news these days. Earlier this week, Zimmy dropped his oddly enjoyable holiday album Christmas In the Heart. Now comes news that
When you hear Justin Vernon talk in between songs with a deep vibrato, you wonder if this is the same guy with the ghostly falsetto responsible for that album of songs penned around a frigid Wisconsin winter. But then when he starts to sing, you nod in clear realization.
