by Tom Johnson For their major label debut, the Decemberists didn’t pull any punches. If anything, they seemed to have gone off the deep end, as if attempting to get the label to cry fowl. But they played along (“13 minute songs? Sure, why not?”) and we the listeners benefitedRead More

Somber, but I really like this. Glen Campbell is definitely going out on top.

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 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 Tom Johnson It may not quite seem like it’s possible, but it’s been 7 years since Real Gone, the last album of original new music from Waits. You May Also Like: How Tom Waits Got Focused But Stayed Blessedly Weird on ‘Bad As Me’ Of All the Tom WaitsRead More

by Tom Johnson Some music feels overwhelming. When Battles hit their stride with Mirrored, the first feeling was that, as tight as they were, they felt like the wheels were just moments from being flung off. Or they were strapping you into a tilt-a-whirl that would quickly go out ofRead More

“Surprise” is right: Sounding more like a spiritual and sonic brother to 1990’s fantastic Wrong Way Up, by Brian Eno and John Cale, Surprise hardly sounds like a Simon album at all. And that’s what seemed to have long-time fans scratching their heads — the odd instrumentation and textures, notRead More

by Tom Johnson Leaving aside the goofy name, Pugwash was that weird bastard child we music writers like to talk about — you know, the “this meets that”: They sounded like latter day XTC meets Jellyfish. In one album, in addition to Pugwash’s own Thomas Walsh, we find friends fromRead More