Archive for the ‘reviews’ Category
Sunday, April 6th, 2008
What would you do after recording an album like Movements? How would you top it? Would you even try? After tracks as anthemic as "Mandarine Girl" and "In White Rooms", anything less uplifting would seem like a come down. So if you're not gonna top it, what are the other ...
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Saturday, April 5th, 2008
When Danger Mouse and Cee-Lo strike a pose together as Gnarls Barkley, they'll dress up as anything from Star Wars characters to the Dude and Walter from The Big Lebowski. But their greatest costume concept has to be Hunter S. Thompson and his attorney, because that captures the fear and ...
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Saturday, April 5th, 2008
Kylie Minogue has never commanded the zeitgeist like Madonna or stalked a stage with the queenly cool of Beyoncé or hurtled across octaves like Mariah. But in a two-decade career, the pint-size Aussie has ruled the British and European charts by supplying nonstop fizzy fun — she's pop divadom's party ...
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Saturday, April 5th, 2008
Like a bottle of Heinz ketchup on a diner counter, a George Strait album is a reassuring product. At fifty-five, dude's spent his life making fairly low-bullshit, high-yield mainstream country: Since 1981's Strait Country, his LPs have gone platinum or better thirty-two times, and the four-CD anthology Strait Out of ...
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Friday, April 4th, 2008
Last year, Gnarls Barkley's sound scientist, Brian "Danger Mouse" Burton, asked the Black Keys to write songs for an album by Ike Turner. When Turner died in December, so did the project, but its ideas took root. Burton was drafted to produce the next album by the group from Akron, ...
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Thursday, April 3rd, 2008
DJs who make a beeline for the Move D section in record shops are usually deep house heads?his recent 12-inches have ranged from bass-driven and bumpin? (?Got Thing? on Philpot) to austere and bumpin? (?Quit Quttin?? on Uzuri) to sampledelic and bumpin' (?Track 1? on Workshop). But there are other ...
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Thursday, April 3rd, 2008
The interplay of music and race in the Sixties is usually perceived as a one-way street — white musicians drawing on (or, worse, ripping off) the songs and styles of black artists. Stax Does the Beatles demonstrates that the influence occasionally ran in the other direction, to delightful effect.
A hotbed ...
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Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008
Counting Crows are back. Six years removed from their last studio album Hard Candy, the band has released their fifth studio album, Saturday Nights and Sunday Mornings, this week in a return to the radio airwaves. The band that exploded onto the pop scene in 1994 with their hit ...
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Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008
If you've ever listened to Patrick Wolf, then Kelley Polar's new album will immediately strike a chord with you. Not only are both musicians intelligent, idiosyncratic, ginger, and very talented, but both have created their own magical fairytale world they want you to get lost in. In Polar's case we're ...
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Monday, March 31st, 2008
What separates the blues greats from the legends? A good story. And Jack White knows how to tell one. (Did you hear the one about the guitarist who married his sister?) It's no coincidence that his side band is called the Raconteurs: "When you call yourself a musician," the White ...
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