by Tom Johnson Sarah McLachlan’s angelic voice is reason enough to check out this new album. It’s certainly not to hear anything particularly new: Afterglow was just more of what Sarah does so well. The most powerful segments of the album arrived early on, with the more up-tempo material providingRead More

With Happy Daze, singer/songwriter Steve Macfarlane whisks us back to the lushly sophisticated melodies of Burt Bacharach and Neil Sedaka, perhaps his clearest inspiration. It’s a tricky thing, since both so often risked sounding mushy or maudlin You May Also Like: The Rainy Daze, “That Acapulco Gold” (1967): One TrackRead More

by Tom Johnson Do we need another Radiohead cover? Hasn’t everything been said about Radiohead by artists from every corner of the music world? You May Also Like: Richard Turgeon, “Better With You” (2022): One Track Mind Richard Turgeon, “Learning to Fly” (2020): One Track Mind

Liam Finn’s second solo record is different, something far more conventionally pop-infused than his 2007 debut, a thrilling but almost confusingly complex outburst of creativity called I’ll Be Lightning — and that can, at first, sound like a step backward. It starts with his noticeable drift back into the shadowRead More