Chris Bathgate — Salt Year. This album absolutely blew me away. It’s delicate and carefully put together, gothic and traditional, noisy and dischordant and heartbreakingly light and lovely, sometimes all of those things in the same song. Based in delicate piano and acoustic guitar lines, the strength of it is in melody and Bathgate’s shuddery,…
Category: opinions about albums
centro-matic — candidate waltz
Centro-matic — Candidate Waltz. Out today. Will Johnson, the prolific songwriter and artist behind Centro-matic, South San Gabriel, and a gorgeous set of recordings under his own name, does not seem to be scared of anything. Each of his bands has a distinct sound, and every Centro-matic album never quite sounds like the one before…
i keep having dreams
Frank Turner — England Take My Bones. Out today, Epitaph Records. I have a ridiculous number of feelings about the new Frank Turner album, England Keep My Bones, which came out today. I have a ridiculous number of feelings about Frank Turner, frankly, which if you are Pam or Megan you know, and if you…
two sentence reviews of new albums i listened to in may
Two sentence reviews of reasonably new albums I listened to in May. Where by “two sentences” I mean “about five sentences, probably strung together into a single sentence with semi-colons”. Frank Turner — England Take My Bones Pre-Order EP: Dear Frank, I know you were probably sad that this leaked to the internets so early, but…
two sentence reviews of reasonably new albums i listened to in may, local edition
Short but sweet: three not-entirely-recent local releases I dug on in the last few weeks. All highly recommended. Mount Moriah — self-titled: staggeringly lovely, painfully intimate, gorgeously detailed, and absolutely heartbreaking. The most straight-up beautiful album released in North Carolina so far this year. Mandolin Orange — Quiet Little Room: I’ve seen Mandolin Orange a…
acrylics — lives and treasure
I saw Acrylics open for the Morning Benders just over a year ago; if fellow tour partner and opener the Miniature Tigers were the Morning Benders’ rock and roll side, Acrylics’ performance and their lovely debut album, Lives and Treasure, are much more closely aligned to the electronic, hollowly delicate side of last year’s stellar…
two sentence reviews of new albums i listened to in april
Two sentence reviews of reasonably new albums I listened to in April. Short this month, because I had a ton of shows and very little new music input, plus I wrote a bunch of longer reviews, but you get what you pay for, so: Hammer No More The Fingers — Black Shark: among the best,…
best albums of 2011, so far: april edition
I meant to do this at the end of March, and then it slipped away from me, and now April has slipped away from me, as well, leaving me at the end of the first … third of the year instead of the slightly more standard first quarter. But it’s all the passing of time…
preview: hayes carll/jason isbell @ the lincoln
I haven’t seen either Hayes or Jason play in several years; Hayes because he wasn’t touring here, and Jason for a variety of other reasons, but they’re currently touring together in support of new albums and playing the Lincoln Theatre in Raleigh on 4/19. Behind the jump, short reviews of both and some details about…
cameron mcgill & what army — is a beast
Cameron McGill & What Army — Is A Beast. Out 4/12. When I dropped a short preview of this album in my February Two Sentences reviews, I said that it was dark and lush, and the more I listen to it, the more I stand by those two words to describe it. Cameron’s vocals are,…
brand new kind of photography 