»Album Reviews For Release Date: 09.27.11
by Joshua Krage

Huuuge week again! And next week’s got awesomeness as well. Hope you’re good at choosing, because unless you’re a secret millionaire you won’t be able to afford every amazing album on this list…

Acoustic Alchemy
Allstar Weekend
Anathema
Anvil
Sebastian Bach
The Bangles
Barenaked Ladies, Hits From Yesterday & the Day Before – yes, it’s a best-of but the cut above here is that I just really like the cover. And of course their best hits are brilliant, like They Might Be Giants going for pop stardom. Love these guys.
Lewis Black, The Prophet – big score for old-school Lewis Black fans, it’s an archived stand-up performance from 1990, back in the days of the first Bush and all the great comedy that came with Dan Quayle in the public eye.
Blink-182

Bonnie Prince Billy, The Mindeater EP – definitely more like his early freak-folk stuff; if you’re a big Palace fan, you’ll love this four-song collab with the Phantom Family Halo group.

Joe Bonamassa / Beth Hart, Don’t Explain – 10 smokin’ soul/blues covers, great pairing of JB and Beth Hart’s firebrand voices with Bonamassa’s incendiary guitar and backing band.

Boom Bip, Zig Zaj – a welcome return to solo work for the innovative producer, recently off his Gruff Rhys collab Neon Neon and full of synth-y, epic ’80s-inspired textures and soundscapes. Kind of downbeat and safe throughout, with more electronic layers than hip-hop beats, but guest spots from Cate Le Bon and Alex Kapranos (Franz Ferdinand) lend some extra flavor.

Carolina Liar
Chickenfoot
J Cole
Harry Connick Jr. – Xmas book companion
Andrae Crouch
Jason Derülo

Dominant Legs, Invitation – big, elastic debut LP full of love and life from newly-expanded San Francisco outfit. Other appropriate adjectives: playful, exuberant, bouncy.

Dum Dum Girls, Only In Dreams – this band’s debut work was all reverb’d-out hazy shoegaze-punk, so this second set is a shocking leap forward everywhere. Bandleader Dee Dee’s vocals are actually discernible (and quite strong), she has a full band not just playing with her but also on backing vox and harmonies, and the production has actual edges and corners instead of vague, hazy layers. Rather heartbreaking lyrics all through this LP also, Dee Dee coming to grips with the loss of her mother among other serious fare woven into these electrified, ’60s shoewop-gazy pop nuggets– a perfect juxtaposition of sad moments expressed in frenzied guitar attack.

Frenzal Rhomb

Daryl Hall, Laughing Down Crying – really good solo album with a sad-but-epic backstory. C’mon, does this guy write anything but solid gold radio-ready melodies and hooks? If you’re a fan, you’ll like.

Will Hoge, Number Seven – after the devastating emotional cleanse of last LP The Wreckage, it’s good to hear Hoge return his focus outward, tackling all sorts of fare on this aptly-titled seventh album. Like a distillation of the ethic born of classic rock-era rock songwriters like Springsteen, Petty, and Seger, Will Hoge starts off with solid, working man’s songs, sung in a scruffy low tenor that screams t-shirt & blue jeans, then brings in his road-tested band to hang tasteful bits of piano, slide guitar, and more in the perfect places. Song topics range all over, from being down & out, to immigration, to young love, to old love, and old rockers, creating a sort of traveling narrative that doesn’t so much string everything together as make a solid variety-pack of unmistakenly American rock & roll.

The Knux, Eraser – second run from former Nawlinz MCs brings the live band in place of turntables and rockets off in a pop-crossover direction, before really figuring out if it can work or not. Sometimes yes, sometimes no, but it’s an interesting turn for a duo that seemed on the verge of what so many other hip-hop teams have done before, and it’ll at least be interesting to see where they go from here.

L.A. Guns
Rachel Lampa
Bill Laswell
Machinehead
Dan Mangan
Mastodon
Maylene & the Sons of Disaster
Seth McFarlane, Music Is Better Than Words – at first glance, it’s a straight-up big band record from the entertainment mastermind and voice of Family Guy’s Peter Griffin (among others). There may or may not be multiple levels of ironic appreciation or parody at work here, but McFarlane’s gift for sonic mimicry is in top form as a standards-era crooner over this fully-arranged album of lesser-known classics.
The Mekons
Tim Minchin – live
Misfits
Mocean Worker
Nappy Roots
Nirvana – Nevermind super deluxe 20th anniv deluxe ed with sprinkles & stuff
Ohbijou
OST – Footloose (remake)
Pink Floyd – full catalog remasters (!). Ace celebratory performances feaetured on Late Night w/ Jimmy Fallon from the likes of Foo Fighters (w/ Roger Waters!), MGMT, Dierks Bentley, The Shins, and Pearl Jam. Shiny.
Plaid
Tyler Ramsey (Band of Horses guitarist)
Leann Rimes
Josh Rouse
John Scofield
Derek Sherinian

Spank Rock, Everything Is Boring and Everyone is a F—-ing Liar – big drama in the six years between notwithstanding, Spank Rock main man Naeem Juwan brings the power back for LP2, with strong and wiggy production & guest spots from Pharrell, Sam Spiegel (N.A.S.A.), Boys Noize, Santigold and more.

Matthew Sweet

Switchfoot, Vice Verses – no band has consistently brought huge, sticky chorus hooks as plentifully as these five San Diegans. Their now-trademark huge guitar power-pop sound returns in full force on this eighth proper studio album, and amazingly frontman Jon Foreman yet again constructs a whole roster of brand new heavy hooks to lodge right in your noggin. But above all this, the thing that most amazes me about this band is Foreman’s lyrical gift, threading themes about being soberly real and searching for life’s deeper meanings and delivering them in music which always manages to suit the content hand-to-glove. This band has been in amazing form since The Beautiful Letdown broke them open wide and hasn’t lost the gift yet, and this set of songs digs deeper into our confusing, seemingly loveless world and pulls out some solid reasons to hold on to hope through the quiet laments and the fist-in-the-air choruses.

Twin Sister, In Heaven – what an interesting band– a Long Island, NY five-piece full of danceable synth textures and dreamy pop structures but beholden to no clear-cut style. They’ve toured with tUnE-yArDs so that says something about their eclecticism, but their fluidity between genres is a marvel, switching easily from guitar jangle to dance floor fillers to folk breakdowns and giving vocalists Andrea Estella and Eric Cardona a wide variety of sonic structures over which to lay down their impassioned croons.

VA – Now Xmas vol 4
VA – Putumayo Presents: Acoustic Cafe
VA – Wow Xmas 2011
VA – Wow Hits 2012

VHS or Beta, Diamonds or Death – fourth album from synth-rockers, continuing their trend of blatantly and brilliantly displaying their influences in full view rather than trying to tack on something “different” or even really “original,” but it’s rather danceable.

Warm Ghost, Narrows – I’m absolutely loving downtempo dream-synth stuff these days, so this album from the Brooklyn duo comes along at the perfect time to join Washed Out, I Break Horses and many other ambient beat wizards on my playlist. Awash in keyboard layers like soothing breezes, this LP slowly rolls out like the sky before sunrise and gently raises the light in majestic fashion track after track.

Wilco, The Whole Love – having covered almost every genre available to the point of self-parody up to now, Wilco could have gone anywhere with this album– and they kinda do in some really satisfying ways. From the gritty guitar tones and electronic textures of opener “Art of Almost” to the strange, almost precious ambience of “Sunloathe” to “Black Moon”s spacious strings and steel guitar swells, Jeff Tweedy lets loose with easy confidence atop pitch-perfect playing and killer interplay between his band’s unearthly-versatile players. No experimental left-turns here, mostly a journeyman’s album of strong songs by a band who’s been twice and more through the fire and can take the simplest lyric or run and turn it into a beautiful beast.

Johnny Winter
Youth Lagoon
Dan Zanes
Zechs Marquise

Surprisingly big week, no? If you didn’t find something tasty in this list, check those ears. Or eyes, depending on whether you read or listened.

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To view past reviews, visit our archives.

»Album Reviews For Release Date: 11.10.09
by Joshua Krage

This week is evidently the week to release the live footage/tracks from that show you did in London that one time. And if you didn’t play a show in London, just throw together a Best Of from your latest set of albums. Don’t have a latest set of albums? Maybe on account of your band being broken up or your frontman being dead? I’m sure you’ve got some old vault material or an acoustic/choral arrangement or twelve to get a release ready before Holiday Shopping Season begins. All that being said, that’s most of what’s out this week, but there are a few bright spots, so here you go:

AC/DC- box set (with a deluxe edition contained in a working guitar amp. Seriously. \m/ )
Tori Amos – Midwinter Graces (Christmas)
Anthrax- CD/DVD

Asobi Seksu, Rewolf – I fell in love with this band after their Citrus album, which had a hefty helping of angular, blissful indie guitar reverb and Yuki Chikudate’s fragile, angelic vocals, so I was disappointed when they followed that album up with an LP full of colorless new-wave drone, but I still liked the overall sound so I stuck with them. This entry into their catalog is an acoustic rendering of some of their better stuff (with sadly no new songs), recorded at “London’s renowned Olympic Studios” (just before it closed its doors for good), and is a mixed bag of pristine joy and yawn-inducing meh. “Acoustic” means that James Hanna’s usually killer guitar work is inexcusably absent from their signature sound (replaced by monotonous strumming), and there’s no end of xylophone and toy piano fills which fail to replace the wonderfully orchestrated noise usually present on their songs. They even turned their best song (“Thursday”) into a cringe-worthy, mellowed-out waltz, proving either they weren’t paying attention or are clearly misguided as to what sounds good about them in general. There are a couple decent re-worked tracks worth checking out here, but for the most part this album is just a further slide down a bland, sleep-inducing hill.

The Cribs, Ignore the Ignorant – a little bit older, a little less jittery, and with the legendary Johnny Marr joining the ranks of the Jarman bros, this new album has a considerable amount of guitar punch in some gritty, tasteful ways. I kind of miss the youthful attention-deficit jangle of their last LP, but they still have a big, bright sound and Ryan (and Gary) Jarman’s throaty yowl is well-utilized on these well-crafted songs.

Dashboard Confessional
Ray Davies – Kinks Choral Collection
The Doors – Live in NY six-CD set
Flyleaf
Hawthorne Heights
Hollywood Undead
Jackson 5 – unreleased early masters
Kids Bop Kids – Beatles – all I’m saying is they better leave “Norwegian Wood” and “Do It In the Road” OFF this album
The Killers – Live From the Royal Albert Hall
Kings of Leon – Live at the 02 London DVD
MF Doom
Annie Moses Band
Jason Mraz – live
OST – 2012
Dolly Parton – Live in London
The Pixies – Minotaur – five CD, six DVD huuuge box set
Omar Rodriguez- Lopez (of The Mars Volta)
Sleep Whale
Snow Patrol- best of
Britney Spears- best of
The Starting Line

Switchfoot, Hello Hurricane – I don’t know how these fellas consistently come up with so many memorable melodies, but every album they’ve released since The Beautiful Letdown has been chock-full of singles (fast, slow, mid-tempo, off-tempo) with huge hooks and catchy choruses enough to make a convert of even the most casual listener. This new album continues that streak, from the anthemic opener “Needle and Haystack Life” to the start-stop rock crunch of first single “Mess of Me,” the impassioned plea of “Enough to Let Me Go” to the sprinting grandeur of the title track, every chorus is noteworthy and every lyric is well-considered with no throwaways in the bunch. And all of this AFTER frontman Jon Foreman just released four six-track EPs last year. It seems like God put this guy on earth solely to convey this amazing abundance of pop/rock goodness to the masses, and his voice is continually up to the challenge of singing these anthems in perfect form. I love this band and am happy to report this album will please any and all fans, as well as anyone looking for solid songcraft, musicianship, and lyrical skill.

Three 6 Mafia
The Tubes
Wale
Wyclef Jean

So yeah, kind of dry overall, but don’t give up hope because next week is the big pre-Thanksgiving push, with brand new albums dropping from the likes of Norah Jones, John Mayer, Kris Allen (AmIdol), Leona Lewis, Katy Perry (unplugged), OneRepublic, Stereophonics, and Them Crooked Vultures (who, if you haven’t heard, is Josh Homme, Dave Grohl, and John Paul Jones. Yes, THAT John Paul Jones). The horizon is amply bright, and I’ll see you there. Next week.

P.S. If you should wish to hear some of the high points of this week’s list, tune into my MySpace Page for a playlist. Enjoy.

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To view past reviews, visit our archives.