Nashville-based Seth Walker hits a sweet spot of soulful folk-blues where Keb Mo, Eric Lindell and Eric Bibb intersect, and like those three, he has little trouble communicating the intended feel of his lyrics. His vocal style has been compared to Ray Charles and Delbert McClinton, but there’s a smoothRead More

Jazz supergroups come and go but with a new album looming for the third year in a row, The Cookers have signalled they are serious as a long term cooperative. They could be egged on by the acclaim heaped on their second effort, last years’ Cast The First Stone, butRead More

Kevn Kinney, longtime leader of Drivin N Cryin, cops to the fact that his group has always had a broad palette of influences — something that can give their albums a weird schizophrenia at times. He compares it, quite appropriately, to “The Kinks meet the Who meet the Ramones andRead More

This massive 10-CD box set is perfect for somebody looking to load up on music from a variety of 1970s genres: folk, folk rock, pop, rock, psychedelic rock … it’s all there. The broad categories presented are: “Groovin,’” “Born To Be Wild,” “Time of the Season,” “Age of Aquarius,” andRead More

Each of their most recent three albums had some sort of gimmick involved, and jazz-metal-avant weirdos Fantomas’ Suspended Animation didn’t deviate from that successful formula. The album mirrors Fantomas’ self-titled album a bit in that it’s essentially just a bunch of short tracks named consecutively. Where their first album wasRead More

A collaboration between jazz guitarist Bill Frisell and drummer Matt Chamberlain, it must have seemed pretty straight-forward upon first inspection: Frisell doing his Americana-tinged jazz guitar thing and Chamberlain laying down grooves behind him. But look at the names listed with them on the cover and you quickly began toRead More

The Flaming Lips are an odd band. A pretty unique blend of art rock and nearly bubblegum pop. When I first heard The Soft Bulletin it made me stop to wonder: just what is this stuff? What struck me immediately was the nearly John Bohnam-like drumming … odd in thisRead More

Kottke’s a funny guy and a beyond great guitar player. While I’m generally a bigger fan of his solo guitar records, there’s always something of interest lurking on the rest of Kottke’s albums. Highly recommended: Ice Water has his version of Tom T. Hall’s classic “Pamela Brown.” Also, check outRead More

A best-of is really nothing to get excited about; they already have one of those, and this one even looks very similar in design. Basically, this sums up the band’s career from first album The Warning through Hear in the Now Frontier along with one track from Mindcrime II. ThereRead More

It must be the time of year. It must be the heat. Or the humidity. Whatever the reason, I have a big hankering for some off-kilter music. Now that I think about it, I always have a hankering for that stuff. It’s just that sometimes the feeling goes from aRead More