Album Review: Pet Shop Boys – Electric
After the calm of Elysium comes the storm of Electric. The second album in 10 months from Pet Shop Boys couldn’t be more different to its predecessor. While Elysium contemplated aging, love, and death...
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Live Review: Pale Seas at London’s Hoxton Hall (7/24)
Like many buildings used for arts and music in London, Hoxton Hall has a colorful past, at one time or other a music hall, Quaker mission, WW2 air raid shelter, theatre, and youth arts centre. Tonight...
View ArticleAlbum Review: The Civil Wars – The Civil Wars
The cover art to The Civil Wars’ self-titled sophomore album depicts a vast, billowing plume of black smoke, suggestive, perhaps, of a smoldering relationship that eventually ignited and left some...
View ArticleAlbum Review: Glen Campbell – See You There
Anyone with a family member or close friend suffering with Alzheimer’s disease in their twilight years can do nothing but applaud See You There, Glen Campbell’s reinterpretation of some of his classic...
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Karaoke and Covers: A Response to Rob Sheffield’s Turn Around Bright Eyes
There is simply no other American ritual that rewards people for doing things they suck at doing. Yet we stick around, before and after our song, cheering each other’s flaws. --Rob Sheffield John...
View ArticleAlbum Review: Annie – A&R EP
In most music circles, A&R stands for “artists and repertoire”: talent scouts for record labels. In the late ’70s they would stick out like sore thumbs at punk gigs. They were the ones carrying...
View ArticleAlbum Review: Laura Veirs – Warp & Weft
Warp & Weft was conceived while Portland, Oregon-based singer-songwriter Laura Veirs was pregnant with her second child. The ninth studio album in a productive career sees Veirs juggling the...
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Belle and Sebastian: 12 Great Songs and Stories
Stuart Murdoch’s Glasgow band started off as a college project, with Murdoch turning in the first Belle and Sebastian record, 1996′s Tigermilk, as his finished assignment. While he found himself...
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Live Review: Bridie Jackson and The Arbour at London’s The Islington (10/30)
If you can overcome the natural misgivings that arise when you find a venue’s website is its Facebook page, then The Islington is a pleasant place to catch some live music. It’s a homely North London...
View ArticleAlbum Review: The Daydream Club – Found EP
Dubbed “the English Civil Wars” in some quarters, The Daydream Club open their new fan-funded EP, Found, with hollow, resonant guitar and brisk percussion that reinforce that comparison. What the duo...
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Live Review: Laura Veirs at London’s Islington Assembly Hall (11/21)
Anyone familiar with the writings of Douglas Adams will have clocked Upper Street, Islington as the key London location of Arthur Dent when not traversing far-flung galaxies with his chums. The street...
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Live Review: Summer Camp at London’s Heaven (11/27)
I’m in Heaven. Decked out in white suits, the husband and wife team of Jeremy Warmsley and Elizabeth Sankey that makes up Summer Camp seemed suitably attired for a gig at the pearly gates. Sparkling...
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Album Review: Mumford & Sons – Sigh No More
British four-piece Mumford & Sons has been in the vanguard of something of a UK folk revival since the band formed two years ago and create manly, passionate music which stirs the soul and warms...
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Cinema Sounds: Love Actually
Let’s face it; actually, you either love it or hate it. Funny, tear-jerking, uplifting, and the perfect feel-good film for Christmas, or as lifted from the Monty Python sketch about Oscar Wilde, a...
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Listen: Roland Albertson
Roland Albertson occupies a particularly crowded bit of beach musically. When you put the words singer and songwriter together, there’s generally little room left for a parasol. Mind you the South...
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