One more time before … What? Let’s back up a handful of years. At that point, me and TheWife™ had been married for going on ten years and were living out here in the country in our big ‘ole house, working and taking care of my parents You May AlsoRead More

by Mark Saleski When this album arrived in 2003, part of me wanted to say that nothing much had happened since Blood Sugar Sex Magik. But the thought was really closer to “I haven’t gotten off on much of their stuff since BSSM. You May Also Like: When John FruscianteRead More

This tune begins, in its familiar way, with a soaring keyboard signature we’ve all come to associate so fully with Keith Emerson’s opening of Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man,” as interpreted in 1977 by Emerson, Lake and Palmer. You May Also Like: No related posts.

Three years into Battles’ existence, it had only issued a single and two EPs — until this, their long-awaited debut album. The wait was more than worth it. Where the EPs hinted at what was to come, they suffered a bit from a band struggling to define themselves. Mirrored provedRead More

by Tom Johnson An eclectic and, for lack of a better word, spazzy releases, Yo La Tengo’s Beat Your Ass actually worked because it lacked focus. Rather than get bogged down in one particular style, the band instead pretty much covered every bit of territory they have ever touched upon.Read More

by Tom Johnson It isn’t necessarily that blemish was so drastically different than anything David Sylvian had done before. He’d done ambient, both alone and with such visionaries as Holger Czukay and Robert Fripp, and some of it verged on being noise to me. You May Also Like: Mark Papagno:Read More

by Mark Saleski I came very, very late to the Nick Cave game. How late? 2004, and Abattoir Blues/Lyre of Orpheus. That album blew the top of my head clean off. I listened to almost nothing else for a couple of weeks, allowing the music to soak in deeply. InRead More

by Mark Saleski I can probably count on the fingers of one hand the number of jazz “with strings” records that ‘work’ for me. This is a somewhat mysterious phenomenon as jazz and improvised music is food to me. You May Also Like: Steve Kuhn Trio – ‘To and FromRead More

by Tom Johnson When a band has more than one “best of” in their catalog, it’s usually because one skimped on a portion of the band’s catalog that was really pretty signficant. This one, however, only fills in a few gaps of the previous best-of, Capitol Punishment, while mirroring aRead More

by Mark Saleski It was at a small Japanese restaurant north of Boston (or south of Concord, New Hampshire, depending on your level of Hub-centricness). Sushi. Never had it before. You read about things like this for years. Suddenly, it’s your turn. You May Also Like: John Scofield – ‘SwallowRead More