Album Reviews
El Ten Eleven - These Promises are Being Videotaped
The double-neck guitar is the ultimate signifier of musical masturbation and phallocentric crotch rocking. That is, unless you’re El Ten Eleven, the post-rock duo from Los Angeles, who lay down simple rhythms, then wield the finished product as mechanized dance jams. During live performances, Kristian Dunn, brandishing his beautiful guitar/bass, and drummer Tim Fogarty create […]
Portugal. The Man - Censored Colors
Something wicked has come out of Wasilla, Alaska, and it’s not a bespectacled, moose-burger-eating enfant terrible of presidential politics. Instead, it is the sprawling sound of outlandish rock quartet Portugal. The Man. Crafted like an eclectic cathedral of sound, each song on the grandiose album Censored Colors is a keystone. And the sum is […]
Darker My Love - 2
If Syd Barrett, the late singer of Pink Floyd, had gotten the opportunity to sit in with Mudhoney, something resembling Darker My Love might have been the result. The Los Angeles-based band’s latest release, 2, alternates between muddy, haze-filled stoner jams and British psychedelia fit for lounging around a milk bar with George Harrison and […]
Hunter S. Thompson: The Gonzo Tapes: The Life + Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson
Truth and fiction were fluid concepts for seminal “Gonzo” journalist Hunter S. Thompson. But, despite Thompson’s penchant for exaggeration, there was usually a morsel of truth in his drug-induced ramblings, political diatribes, and flights of fancy. This five-disc set was painstakingly extracted from the mess of audio recordings left behind by “The Good Doctor,” after […]
Dungen - 4
Not everyone can transcend genre and stretch the definition of the rock song like Dungen. On 4, the Swedish band exchanges itsusual ’60s-style jams for tightly orchestrated songs composed of jazz drums, glockenspiels, and grand pianos. Gone are the repeating verse-choruses of traditional rock, but the core Dungen sound remains intact, due largely to virtuosic […]
Télépathique - Last Time on Earth
“I am not from the last century, don’t wanna be,” Mylene Pires, the sometimes-sweet songstress, sometimes-Ladytronic robo-talker of Télépathique, sings on “Déjà vu.” But she is lying. Télépathique is so last century. From the riot grrrl talk-sing to the break beats and up-tempo catwalk keyboards, the São Paulo, Brazil-spawned duo of Pires and producer/drummer […]
Patti Smith + Kevin Shields - The Coral Sea
In 2005 and 2006, Patti Smith paid homage to her late lover, the immensely talented artist Robert Mapplethorpe, in two transcendent performances at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall. The beautiful double-disc set of these performances is an enraptured testimony to the life of Mapplethorpe. Smith’s two-hour-long readings of work from her 1997 book The Coral […]
Arabian Prince - Innovative Life - The Anthology 1984 -1989
There is no Hip Hop Genome Project. No scientists in lab coats examining the contents of mix tapes; no geneticists pouring beats from beaker to beaker; or pipe-smoking socialites discussing the necessities of “Bring the Noize.” But fortunately, there is Stones Throw Records, the closest thing to a hip-hop think tank created by DJ and […]
Calexico - Carried to Dust
A new Calexico album is seldom something new. Instead, the nouveau-Western band’s albums evoke the pleasure of rediscovering a favorite book: poring over familiar passages, returning to a forgotten place. After almost twenty years of making music together, Calexico’s newest album, Carried to Dust, is an enjoyable embrace of nuance rather than novelty. There is […]
Suicide - Live 1977 - 1978
Suicide is not for everyone, and the six-disc box set of the brutal, self-indulgent, no-wave duo of Alan Vega and Martin Rev opens up the back catalog of America’s punked-up answer to Kraftwerk. With Rev rolling out repetitive keyboard lines, backed by a rudimentary drum machine, and Vega vacillating between manic screams and mutant-Elvis warbles, […]
Battles: Tonto + EP
Battles are not so much a band as they are an assembly line of interlocking guitar and keyboard rhythms, piston pumping drums and transmogrified vocals building math-rock songs one note at a time…(more)
The Sword: Gods of the Earth
The landscape is arid, harsh, and unforgiving. The earth is cracked
and laid waste, a foreboding storm lurks behind the craggy mountains…(More)
Nigeria 70: Lagos Jump
During the incipient stages of global exploration in the 1800’s, European explorers viewed sub-Saharan as a conundrum, a “dark continent” that cartographers left as darkened, un-delineated areas on maps. Much contemporary African pop music carries the legacy of the “dark continent” today, leaving many international audiences without a frame of reference for Africa’s effervescent rhythms…(more)
Clipd Beaks: Hoarse Lords
It’s not often that the cacophony of everyday ecstasies, neuroses and anxieties is accurately captured in music with the precision and innovation as Clipd Beak’s debut album Hoarse Lords.
