Rating: 5.5

What do you get when you mix a former guitarist of a respected indie outfit, chiming guitars, a piano, and a lot of ooey-gooey feeling? Well, generally you get shit, but in this case it’s not quite that extreme and at least it’s not a major label doing the dumping. All Smiles is the name for the pet project of former Grandaddy guitarist Jim Fairchild. The Modesto axeman teams up with Janet Weiss of Sleater-Kinney and Joe Plummer of Modest Mouse to form his solo debut, Ten Readings of a Warning. Although Fairchild certainly knows how to spin a yarn and deal out wild poetry with both his voice and his instrument, the album is largely a mixed bag of a few standouts and a lot of dull.

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Rating: 8.0

(The first portion of this review is inconsequential, more or less, to my critique of Radical Face’s “Ghost”. Therefore, feel free to begin reading below the dotted line if you are running late for your work, bar mitzvah, or loved one’s murder trial.)

Hey fuckers, stop talking about ghosts. For the last few years, you have felt the need to stick it in your band names, album titles, and lyrics like it just got invented. I’d rather hear songs referencing blogs. And don’t give me that shit where you say you didn’t notice. Type “Ghost” and any other word in the English language, and seven indie rock bands have already used it. It’s getting fucking boring. Try and hide it among a bunch of unrelated words, and then it’s boring AND annoying (Ghostland Observatory, I’m looking in your direction). Just please stop. And while I’m here, if you still talk about ninjas, pirates, unicorns, and robots like you just cracked the fucking pop culture code- you’re just as bad if not worse.

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At some point Ben Cooper decided “Radical Face” was a good name for his solo project and as much as I’d like to disagree, there is a better chance of me forgetting the names of my own STD’s before I forget that particular moniker. Unfortunately, not all of his ideas are quite so indelible, and end up crippling the otherwise formidable debut, “Ghost”.

Glory mp3

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Rating: 10.0

“When I left they were sleeping, I hope you run into them soon. Don’t turn on the lights, you can read their address by the moon.” Leonard Cohen is primarily a poet, not some kind of rock and roll juggernaut. Several volumes of his poetry were published, along with two novels, years before he recorded his first album, released in 1967. His first three records are essential folk masterpieces that are a world apart from his later recordings,  where he would begin to stray musically. The reissues are a blinding example of Leonard Cohen at his best. His first album is a highly literate work of sheer brilliance that paved the way for the also near perfect second and third albums. They have just been given the remastering treatment and the re-releases come in classy hardback book packaging. As one would expect, included are the lyrics, which were criminally missing from the earlier cd versions of Songs From a Room and Songs of Love and Hate. There are also a few unreleased tracks thrown in to make us suckers once again purchase albums that we already owned.

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