For the latest season of VH1 Stoytellers, the music network stayed away from legacy artists, instead focusing their attention of on a slew of contemporary acts. During Ray LaMontagne’s highly
Last year, Soulive helped to celebrate the month of March with a ten-show, guest-laden residency at Brooklyn Bowl that was cleverly dubbed Bowlive. For the second year in a row,
Since we’ve spent the entire week recounting our favorite albums of 2010, and quite frankly you’re probably tired of reading about them, seemed like a no-brainer to end the week
For the second consecutive year at Hidden Track, we concocted our innovative little experiment for the year-end Best Albums 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 well over 100 nominees, whereby most everything our contributors recommended made the list. Then we invited our crew of writers to independently and blindly vote on the whole list on a scale of 1 to 20 (20 = five stars). We ended up with varying degrees of familiarity with the nominees as some folks voted on just about everything, while some just a few. From there, we deployed our egghead algorithm for rating albums: (two times the average rating) + (the total number of votes). At that point, we took the top 25 highest scores and presto: the Hidden Track 25 Best Albums of 2010. No bullshit, no big opinions; just the results.
We’re on to day two of on our week long countdown, let’s check out albums number 16-20…
20) Marco Benevento – Between The Needles & Nightfall
Key Tracks: Greenpoint, Between the Needles, Numbers
Sounds Like: Brad Mehldau meets Tortoise
The Skinny: Marco Benevento’s latest solo record is the prolific keyboard player’s most impressive release yet. Bassist Reed Mathis’ sense of space and harmony along with drummer Andrew Barr’s subtly explosive poly-rhythmic playing lay the foundation for Benevento’s hook-laden melodies, shape-shifting piano, and circuit-bent sounds. While his first two studio releases were solid, Between the Needles and Nightfall has a cohesiveness not found on either that allows Marco’s songwriting to truly shine. The one-two punch of Greenpoint and Between the Needles at the front of the album set the overall tone for the album, while Marco’s solo at the end of Numbers highlights the whole thing.
READ ON for the next four albums in our countdown…
In the decade since the runaway success of the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack – which took home the Grammy for Album Of The Year in 2002, and has
