Curtis Eller immediately captivated me a few years ago when he moved back to the Triangle after a number of years in Brooklyn; his songs were a mix of the macabre and the historical, the morbid and the hilarious, and his stage presence was the sort that you couldn’t take your eyes from. How To…
Category: opinions about albums
album review: thea gilmore – regardless
Unless you hung out with a particular batch of Carleton College alums in the early aughts, and thus hung out with my badass friend Rosie, you might not know British singer/songwriter Thea Gilmore — you probably don’t, in fact. Rosie introduced me to Thea in 2003, with a copy of Loft Music — Thea’s excellent…
best of: my 25 favorite records from 2013
1. Ha Ha Tonka – Lessons: like the Tonk would break their own streak of topping my lists the years they release albums. This is a flawless record, comprehensively from start to finish, that packs an intense emotional punch and gorgeous harmonies. Probably my favorite band working right now. (Album review.) 2. Josh Ritter –…
album review: mason jennings — always been
Mason Jennings’ newest album, Always Been, takes its title from track 2, “Patti & Robert”, where the phrase is a repeating chorus; the song itself was inspired after Mason met Patti Smith at a benefit concert in New York City and read Just Kids while flying back to Minnesota. So basically that’s a sentence that…
album review: gross ghost – public housing
Public Housing is a break up album; there’s nothing to hide that from the opening lines of “Seeds”: nothing to do, nothing to say. “Seeds” echoes and weeps with the clarity of the drums under Mike Dillon’s aching vocals in the first chorus. The vocals maintain in that way over the rest of the disc,…
two sentence reviews of reasonably new albums i listened to in september & october
And by “in September” I mean “in the last four days of September because I was behind, epically, on podcasts, all month”, but October was A++ of new listening. Also: full length reviews of Ha Ha Tonka’s Lessons, Two Cow Garage’s The Death of The Self-Preservation Society, and The Julie Ruin’s Run Fast here, and The…
album review: mipso – dark holler pop
Bands from North Carolina with upright basses and banjos and mandolins draw, fairly or unfairly, comparisons to one of two bands, at first: the Avett Brothers, or Chatham County Line. Either the Avetts’ high energy stage show, or Chatham County Line’s cluster around a single microphone and close harmonies. Music writers can’t help themselves when…
release news: the bottle rockets reissue self-titled & the brooklyn side
Somewhere betwen my discovery of Bloodshot Records in 2002 (Neko Case, though she’d just left the label; Kelly Hogan; the Waco Brothers; Rex Hobert & the Misery Boys) and my current dig through Robbie Fulks and Scott H. Biram’s extensive back catalogs, I spent a lot of time trolling used CD bins at record stores…
preview: j roddy walston & the business @ kings
J. Roddy Walston & the Business rock. Sometimes that’s a cliche, and sometimes it’s the only way to describe what a band does. This band, fronted by the volatile and captivating Walston, rocks, and rocks hard. I had the pleasure of seeing them back in September in Chicago, and they had an incredibly diverse crowd —…
ep review / interview: animal parts – six arms to hold you
Toronto musician Joshua Cockerill — who performs solo and with a band as Animal Parts — came onto my radar about this time last year, when he played a couple of North Carolina shows with Scots Admiral Fallow and recently-visited Erin Rae and John Isaac Davey; he writes deeply intense and personal songs, often just accompanied…
brand new kind of photography 