Author Archive
Albums
Bright Little Field – Treatment Bound (2010)
The tribute album is, as I suppose it hardly merits mentioning, a dodgy proposition. It requires an artist who can not only understand the other artist’s work, but who is cognizant enough of its structure that they can of...
Reviews
Karen Dalton – 1966
The selling point and historical significance of Karen Dalton has rested entirely on the uniquely haunting timbre of her voice and the restrained brilliance with which she employed it, bending melody and finding hidden meanings...
Features
Christmas for Everyone
There are respectable entries to the Christmas canon that get some love from the general population. In 1963, A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector took from Leadbelly’s “On a Christmas Day” the distincti...
Reviews
Human Switchboard – Who’s Landing in My Hangar? (2011)
Human Switchboard’s Who’s Landing in My Hangar? is one of the few tenuously Cleveland connected punk/new wave classics to lack a proper reissues. Bar/None Records thankfully rescues this great album from a future of...
Reviews
Wax Idols – No Future (2011)
Haven’t we all gotten tired of that generic tinny lo-fi garage guitar sound? Upward and onward to newer and more glorious fuzz, I say. Down with the old! Appreciate the garage records of yore only for what made them good,...
Reviews
Jules and the Polar Bears – Got No Breeding (1978)
New Wave before New Wave had really solidified. Sort of like Springsteen, but sort of not. Perhaps it’s most accurately described as an offering to bridge the Billy Joel-ers and the Rundgren-ites, a union which sounds fai...
Reviews
Drive-By Proposals – Fall Into Shadow (2005)
Ish Marquez is the hidden light at the end of the otherwise tedious anti-folk tunnel. He has the melodic gifts of Arthur Lee, but without any of the failed lyrical obtuseness. Someday there will be a compilation to sand over th...
Reviews
Styrenes – All the Wrong People are Dying (1998)
All the Wrong People Are Dying is not actually an album, but a collection of the earlier Styrenes album A Monster and a Devil alongside several 12”s and a compilation track. Somehow, despite the cobbled-together nature of...
Playlists
The Occupy America Mixtape
Protest movements often result in music that is repetitive and uninspiring, if only for the small number of widely identifiable protest songs. You shouldn't be forced to listen to "The Times They Are a-Changin'" twenty times pe...
Features
Kamikaze Hearts: An Upstate Retrospective
Of all the upstate NY bands to show promise in the last five years – only to fizzle out – did any show more promise than the Kamikaze Hearts? If there was, I didn’t hear them. No other band quite captured the ...
