Rating: 7.5
Classically trained multi-instrumentalist James LaValle, the man behind The Album Leaf, has projected his existence as a solo artist onto his most full-length Into the Blue Again. Although rife with electronic beats and lush strings, the mood of the album is overridingly one of melancholic, beautiful loneliness.
Rating 8.25
I wouldn’t say that it’s easy to fall asleep listening to Deerhoof’s new album, but I’ve done it four times. I guess when you’re sleepy is not the greatest time to give something a good listen; laying down not the best position to do it in. But anyways, I can safely say that if you fall asleep listening to Deerhoof you will have many terrible nightmares. I recall half-waking up in the midst of the last track, which is kind of like a twelve-minute long Kubrick scene. A single guitar creaks and groans and grasps and moans like a malicious wind-chime. There are all these notes that sound out of tune, paired with these sweet little harmonics, but everything’s kind of topsy-turvy and neither feels right. And then the guitar line picks up steam, and kind of rolls over itself, gaining momentum and acting, well, like a little microbe or something, churning through some plasma or whatever a microbe might churn through. This living thing that is just roiling with creepiness gets faster and louder and then bam, it explodes and you’re on this ship now, and things are creaking and squeaking and rocking. There is a fascinating electronic wind and a portentous calm. As if from a distance, a guitar calls out: what is it saying? What does it want? The notes are sad and isolated, incomplete and yearning, angry too. Fall asleep in one of the spaces and the song could end anywhere…
Rating: 6.0
The Killers have quickly propelled themselves into the forefront of popular music by combining unmistakably catchy vocal melodies with modern glam-core keyboards, retro guitar riffs and steady dance beats. The majority of the albums you find in the “rock” section of your average record store these days (can we still call them record stores when they don’t sell records anymore?) are laden with either dark and dirty songs about hating your father for not being around or being bitter towards some girl that dumped you before your band was rocking arenas. And who can blame her, how was she to know? It’s for this reason I haven’t bought a new CD from anywhere but a merchandise table in like four years, (Fire Theft’s debut, soooo good.)
Rating: 8.75
Take all the sentiments you associate with your most heartbreaking love affair: the drama, the beauty, the joy of innocence and the revelation that comes with abandonment—but leave out all the parts that hurt. What you have left is Half the Time, the new Curb Appeal release from New York based Pablo (Paul Schalda with his brother Will, wife Maggie, and the Strandberg brothers.) Rustic and hearty as beef stew, Half the Time is also ethereal and feather-light; it walks the thin line between grace and rough emotion while strumming the crap out of my heartstrings. And there’s that something that happens when people who love each other sing together, something the French call a certain…”I don’t know what.”
1906 was amazing. The Victor Victrola was blasting out the hits! For instance, who can forget “Captain Baby Bunting of the Rocking Horse Brigade”? You can’t? What, are you crazy?! It was a brigade, see, of rocking horses. Ha! And who was leading the charge? Captain Baby Bunting. Oh, that Baby Bunting, he always cracks me up. And the tune is magic! I whistle the tune a lot to keep my spirits up when I’m in the hospital with another bout of scarlet fever.
Rating: 4.0
Greg Dulli of The Twilight Singers and formerly the Afghan Whigs is highly public, bordering on boastful, about his alcohol-soaked, drug heavy past. If his history is intended to tell us something about his music, or vice versa, his music about his tumultuous past, The Twilight Singers’ EP A Stitch In Time has succeeded. A Stitch In Time is an aging rocker’s bar stool ramble; bittersweet story tinged with wisdom, wistfulness and folly.
Rating: 8.0
Low-key isn’t a term often used to describe rock and roll. But every once and a while there comes a band that can bark without the bombast, emote without Emo, and grip without grandeur. One such band is The Annuals, a six-piece jazzy rock band from North Carolina. With an unassuming, diamond-cut devotion to their craft, this odd little band is a fresh breath of air among the stink of artists simply waiting in the fame line.