Last month Sir Paul McCartney added another trophy to the mantle piece when he was honored at the White House with a The Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular
This year marks the 40th anniversary of Miles Davis’ landmark jazz-fusion album Bitches Brew. While the legendary double-album is getting a full deluxe reissue treatment that includes a 4-disc package
On Horehound, The Dead Weather injected their own warped blues into 70’s style doom rock with oomph. On the groups second release Sea of Cowards all shackles seem to be have been discarded, allowing the band to experiment with different sounds, styles, and substances.
Last fall, Levon Helm, the former drummer for The Band, was forced into vocal rest after doctors found a non-cancerous lesion on his vocal chords. While the docs kept us
Bowery Presents has easily cemented themselves as the premiere concert promoter in the New York City area, booking shows in their fullly-owned and operated venues as well as places like
The fine folks at Bowery Presents have been a staple of NYC’s live music scene booking shows around town since the mid ’90s. The concert promoters, who own and book
On March 16, The White Stripes will release Under Great White Northern Lights their first ever concert movie documenting the duo’s 2007 cross-Canada tour – the results of which will
Over the last couple of weeks, there has been a lot of news swirling in regards to the lineup for the ninth annual Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival. All the
As we previously reported, the ever busy Jack White has teamed up with Wanda Jackson to produce the Queen Of Rockabilly’s latest release. The album, which will hit stores later
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…
