Trouble In Dreams, Destroyer's eighth or ninth album (nobody knows for sure) hits on the same elements of 2006’s Destroyer’s Rubies. From the sharp angular rock of “Dark Leaves Form A Thread” to the dripping bass of “The State” and the howling guitar crescendo of “Introducing Angels,” the recording runs across diverse themes.
With Neko Case and Dan Bejar playing live with The New Pornographers, artists that had two of 2006’s best albums (Fox Confessor Brings the Flood and Destroyer’s Rubies), the evening’s performance in Tucson could have been billed as: The New Pornographers feat: Neko Case and Dan Bejar.
Bolstered with an impressive arsenal of instrumentation—piano, strings, banjo, harp, flute, French horn, harmonica and more—Challengers, the much-anticipated fourth album from The New Pornographers, is a positive step forward in the development of a band that has continued to evolve with each subsequent record.
Recorded on August 9, 2003, Neko Case’s appearance on Austin City Limits is obviously a bit late to hit the stores. It only features one song (“Maybe Sparrow) off her latest album, Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, instead concentrating on covers and material from Case’s older albums, all of which are performed with the usual cast of characters that she has taken on the road the past few years.
Indie pop is amazing: it is an endless stream of music, all roughly built around the same instruments and musical structure, yet one can still find music that sounds refreshingly new, interesting, and listenable.
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
As the fancy-pants voice of power pop kings the New Pornographers, Dan Bejar
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.
On their third album, Twin Cinema, and their first since 2003
