A song by Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra comes on like a thunderstorm. The skies darken, things creak in the stillness, someone remarks on the ominous mood and suddenly the world erupts in a calamity of lightning and upheaval. When you think the world is saturated with such unrest, it peters out and the [...]
The Kills’ sexed-up strut rock is the kind that sounds perfect throbbing from behind a motel room door, so it’s befitting that it’s how they got their start. Alison “VV” Mosshart was on tour with her band Discount when she heard James “Hotel” Hince practicing one floor up, and the spell was cast. They recorded [...]
The “Louhen Yhdeksäs Polka” begins with an almost familiar (in these parts, anyway) acrobatic accordion line that quickly gets battered by thundering drum rolls and detonations from a hopelessly distorted guitar. Yet, the accordion persists, like a minion of Thor galloping through the mists, war-hammer aloft. Someone bellows “HEY” from a tortured larynx and the [...]
We all, presumably, like songs. We like there to be dedicated, sensitive souls to write them and then to sing them, yet, there is something about the term “singer/songwriter” that sets the most open-hearted of us on edge. Maybe it’s how a singer/songwriter lays bare the process of writing and you sometimes feel you are [...]
Consider the booty jam. A booty jam holds no allegiance to style, propriety or length. A booty jam will go wherever it must to find that booty or lament its getting away. Old school, new school, rough, smooth—the booty jam will prevail. Bobby Rush is one of the world’s foremost practitioners of the form. Born [...]
Tess Brunet’s debut album under the Au Ras Au Ras moniker is a feat of quiet determination. The phrase “au ras au ras” is Cajun French for “equal footing” and Brunet comes off as a partner in a slow dance with the songs. They are possessed of a beguiling tempo verging on the languid, a [...]
Wye Oak, the Baltimore indie rock duo named for a 460-year old tree in their home state of Maryland, give off an appropriate balance of rooted strength and breezy pliability. They began as stylistic seedlings from a lineage of other bands, the product of, say, the Police’s Ghost in the Machine passed down through Yo [...]
Gillian Welch is the truest kind of cool, the kind that lingers in the background letting the hotshots and attention hogs perform their circus acts and press junkets and media campaigns and when their dizzying dust settles, she steps back up to the mic and shows everybody how it’s done. Her release schedule is a [...]
We may be at the point where we can stop referring to Jason Isbell as a former member of Drive-By Truckers. Here We Rest, his third studio album as a solo artist, establishes Isbell as an artist and bandleader with his own nuanced artistic vision. The album takes its name from his home state of [...]
Sax player Dickie Landry left south Louisiana in 1969 to push music farther than he could back home as a member of the horn section for the Swing Kings. A couple key connections landed him at the apartment of Philip Glass, who was still working on the foundations of the clumsily named “minimalism” that would [...]
