*** STEELY DAN SUNDAY INDEX *** NICK DERISO: I was a huge Steely Dan fan, so I once bought even the individual releases, pining for those lost moments of the 1970s. Meaning: I was ready to love Fagen’s second solo album. Bought it out of the box, hoping for “Aja” with a ’90s spin. What I got was the same [...]

by Pico I’ve never been much of a movie watcher, and less of a fan of movie soundtracks. But back in 2000 I rented the then-new release Finding Forrester, a movie that featured Sean Connery. And while the movie itself was good, I couldn’t help but to notice what an outstanding and adventurous collection of songs chosen to adorn the [...]

by Pico One of the greatest unheralded rock bands to come out of the UK in the sixties was a group of musical misfits called The Soft Machine. This combo was among the earliest and most influential bands from Britain’s Canterbury Scene in the middle of the decade; a loose fraternity that also provided the genesis for Gong, Caravan and [...]

by Pico The other day I was digging Bill Withers’ gentle folk-soul masterwork from 1971, Just As I Am. A week later I still find myself occasionally warbling “Ain’t No Sunshine” when there’s no one else around save for my daughter and nearly sat down to write about it in this space. But then I started thinking about the song [...]

by S. Victor Aaron Back in July, we talked aboutTodd Rundgren’s latest band, The New Cars. Then, we noted that the reconstituted and reconfigurated Cars threw out a few bones during their tour for the “Todd Is God” contingent in the crowd. One of these golden oldies is the brilliant, power-pop “Open My Eyes,” and in that article I, uh, [...]

by S. Victor Aaron While just about everyone else who critiques music have already trotted out their “Best of 2006″ lists, I’m still going through many of these releases for the first time (I might work faster if I got paid better). One of last year’s servings that I finally gave a listen to was a rare one by a [...]

by S. Victor Aaron Earlier in the week we paid homage to the Doobie Brothers, Tom Johnston version. If you’re the kind of person who thinks “What A Fool Believe” is superior to “Long Train Runnin’” or prefer One Step Closer over Stampede, well then, consider this installment of OTM a concession to you. Because we’re about to lay some [...]

In a time when album rock took over the radio airwaves, the Doobie Brothers were a mainstream rock group that were still more of a singles band. I haven’t checked, but I’d bet a stack of Franklins that The Best Of The Doobie Brothers is still far and away their best selling album (and that record didn’t even include most [...]

by Pico I finally got around to listening to Tom Waits’ sprawling odds-and-ends collection Orphans and it occurred to me that Australian-born/England-residing singer-songwriter Nick Cave has a lot of similarities to Waits. Both have scary sounding voices (Waits a whiskey-scarred growl and Cave a deep baritone), write detailed narratives delving in frequently dark themes like death, love and religion, often [...]

In the brilliant, circular overture of synthesizer and riff that opens 2006′s “Endless Wire” we find a triumph for what’s left of the Who. “Fragment,” as a tune, is everything this band should have been doing instead of slowly but surely turning itself into a too-old streetwalker with its faded party hat on crooked. It’s simultaneously familiar, yet utterly new [...]