While mega-coffee chain Starbucks expects to make layoffs and close a number of stores this year, they still seem to knock it out of the park with their custom-made compilation
Jason Collett’s latest record, the 2008 release Here’s To Being Here (Arts & Crafts) is a marvelous thing; it’s personal enough to put on when drinking with friends becomes an option. It begs for authenticity through conversation. He pens lyrics like “The perennial fatigue of the times/when you’re long in the tooth/short in the sleeve/there’s nowhere left to hide” which let you into a world you only feel like sharing with your best friend. All this coming from a guy with three children. And when he’s not getting personal, he’s still littering his albums with references to joints and cigarettes.
Where the Billie Holiday and Kate Bush comparisons are easy, there are contemporary touches from those of Imogen Heap and Cat Power that make The Reminder a very “present” recording. The one failing of The Reminder is that it doesn’t live up to Let It Die, but in Feist’s terms, she’d rather be intimate than play “can you top this.”
At Bumbershoot, as is the case with all the good festivals, many dilemmas arise when it comes to choosing which bands to see and which bands to skip. With no fewer than nine stages to see music (and another two for comedy and still a few other platforms for poets and performance artists), naturally one must make choices, such as between the upbeat rhymes of megastar Kanye West and the swampy New Orleans funk of Ivan Neville
Just as we do every year, Glide has chosen the twenty albums that appeal to us as the strongest artistic statements of the year, representing both our diverse content and readership. Our 20 For 2005, plus a dozen disappointments.
Having sung with Canadian indie-popsters Broken Social Scene to female rapper Peaches to the Kings, Leslie Feist has paid her dues. But it
