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Cotton Candy - Top-Notch and First-Rate (Teenbeat)
The pace of the album, which veers constantly among pop songs, clips from what seem like 50s radio or TV broadcasts, and the band’s renditions of ad jingles, resembles a sugar high from eating too much cotton candy.
30 January 2010Happy New Year
The song begins, to clapped hands, “Happy new year / my dear / it is time to face our fear”. That’s the line I kept singing, like a mantra. It’s a good alternate New Year’s theme, I think – welcome to a new, fearless year.
27 July 2009Cats on Fire - Our Temperance Movement (Matinee)
New doesn’t have to be new, if that makes sense; or, familiar-sounding music is still new if you haven’t heard it before.
22 April 2009Bubblegum Lemonade - Doubleplusgood (Matinee)
It’s a rush of noise around good-old-fashioned pop melody, and of course wrapped up at once with wishes, dreams, and hopes.
1 November 2008Jason Anderson - Life Sucks Love Sucks Dose Out (States Rights)
It’s Anderson’s Astral Weeks, not in sound but feeling, in the internal journey of it and the transcendence it reaches for.
13 April 2008Nada Surf - Lucky (Barsuk)
In a sense Lucky is an album of love songs. But refreshingly these are love songs that aren’t narrow in scope and don’t rely on clichés.
5 January 2008Robert Wyatt - Comicopera (Domino)
There’s a wild streak within – clear-headed musicianship, but also many surprises, all coordinated gracefully by a maestro who into his sixties is making music that’s as visionary as ever.
15 August 2007Best of the Year in Music (Early Edition): Seven Albums You (Possibly) Haven’t Heard
So far this year, not from any great personal endeavor but just from circumstances, most of my favorite albums have been keeping fairly low under the radar.
20 June 2007My Music Collection Has Become a Forest
I’m feeling this growing desire for a map. It sounds ridiculous, really, but I’ve started the Sisyphus-like task of documenting every piece of music I own.
24 April 2007Report From the 16th Annual Philadelphia Film Festival
This year the films included many that I was interested in seeing, those daily-life considerations made me end up seeing just 8 films.
25 February 2007Of Montreal - Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? (Polyvinyl)
Hissing Fauna is the artistic representation of a breakdown. Importantly, though, the sound of the album is not the stereotypical doom-and-gloom.
1 February 2007Ooh...Long Time No Hear!
Isn’t a key part of the absolute joy of music – one reason we all obsess so much – this pleasure in that moment of recognition, and in getting to know the song itself that well in the first place?
27 December 2006My 10 Favorite Albums of 2006 [version]
It’s impossible for me to say definitively what are the 10 most important albums of the year, or even my 10 favorites, without continuing to think “what about this other one?” Here, then, is another Best of 2006 top 10 albums list, one reflecting my thinking today as far as my favorite albums of the past year.
17 November 2006Voxtrot - "Your Biggest Fan" EP (Play Louder)
What we have are some truly special releases…this new one as much as the others, or possibly even more so.
24 October 2006Some of My Favorite Songs Are B-Sides
loved looking through the jukebox for a band that I liked, and picking the song I’d never heard before: the B-side. It was a magical thing; it could be treasure or trash, but always something interesting.7 October 2006Personal Canons: Other Albums That Mean the World to Me
Critics debate the usefulness, or uselessness, of canons all the time. I only care about personal canons, about what albums really mean something to individual people who care about music.
16 September 2006Don't Shout Louder, Say Something New
In our Internet era, anyone can instantly become a music critic, and for a lot of reasons I love that. At the same time, what’s the point if everyone’s writing variations of the same article?
11 August 2006My Love/Hate Relationship with Concert Reviews
I have a hard time writing concert reviews myself. The reason: it’s hard to write about a concert without it turning into a journal entry.
27 July 2006Sometimes, "Classic" Albums are Considered Classics for a Reason
In receiving these CD versions of long-forgotten-but-once-precious-to-me albums, I’m enjoying re-experiencing them, facing them head-on once again.
17 July 2006Listen to Them Again: Re-evaluating Guided by Voices
Listening to that much GBV in a row was never tedious; instead, I found it consistently exciting. I was reminded of how many truly great songs ROBERT POLLARD has written…
7 July 2006Surprise Is the Key: Leave Your Old Favorite Records on the Shelf!
The flip side of the too-much-music dilemma is this: the more music I open myself up to, the greater the likelihood that I will be surprised.
15 June 2006Greater Access to Music = Less Magic in the Long Run?
While I’ve always rejected the notion that there’s too much music released day-to-day, sometimes I wonder whether there’s too much music in my world.
3 June 2006Keene Brothers - Blues and Boogie Shoes (Fading Captain Series)
It’s one of the least straightforward albums Keene has made, and is easily the most straightforward, bordering-on-conventional, album that Pollard has ever made. It’s this balancing act that has led to a certain type of magic—not groundbreaking, but truly satisfying.
22 May 2006Neil Young - Living With War (Reprise)
You don’t put a 100-voice choir on your album, its members singing to the heights of their voices, if all you’re trying to do is express anger.
10 May 2006Mount Eerie with Jason Anderson, Thanksgiving and Feu Therese - First Unitarian Church (Philadelphia) - Tuesday, May 2, 2006
Sometimes it seems like a fruitless exercise, because that night has happened. It’s over, done. It’ll never happen in the same way again.
23 April 2006The Harbor Lights with Pants Yell! and Brrr - Kensington South Forum (Philadelphia) - Monday, April 17, 2006
This show was the final one of the duo’s existence, making it a bittersweet evening: a time to celebrate their music and say goodbye.
15 April 20062006 Philadelphia Film Festival: My Report
With that many films shown across 13 days, who could see enough to summarize the festival? All I can give is a summary of what my Philadelphia film festival was like.
3 April 2006Various Artists - Twelve: A Series [1-5] (Tell All Records)
Each piece can only use one note, in octave, but other than that the musicians have free reign. The results so far have been fascinating.
28 March 2006Stephin Merritt - Showtunes (Nonesuch)
Showtunes is the right name because it simply states the fact of it: this is Merritt writing songs for actual works of theatre instead of imaginary ones.
19 March 2006Is Your Next-Door Neighbor's Band Better Than The Beatles?
I start to imagine that every city, town, or village has so many of these unknown bands in their past, present, and future: bands without the ambition or resources it takes to “make it big” (or even semi-big), yet whose music meant so much to their fans.
12 March 2006Various Artists - Bro Zone (States Rights)
The general spirit of Bro Zone is that of progress, of combining styles and genres in exciting ways. And of creating what you feel, making the music you want to.
25 February 2006Too Young to Die: R.I.P. Jay Dee
Producers are doing much of the most innovative work in hip-hop, and JAY DEE was one of the best, always pushing the boundaries of the music.
13 February 2006Jenny Lewis with The Watson Twins - Rabbit Fur Coat (Team Love)
Lewis directs her doubt upward at a hypothetical, likely non-existent god, outward towards friends, lovers, the government, and religious leaders, and inward towards herself.
1 February 2006'Digital' Vinyl: An Ideal Marriage of the Past and the Future
There’s still something truly special about records. On the other hand, in our digital era, there’s nothing special about a CD.
24 January 2006Mi and L'au with Lewis and Clarke - World Cafe Live (Philadelphia) - Tuesday, January 17, 2006
On this quiet, rainy Tuesday night, the odd yet still laidback mood of the place ended up seeming just right, particularly given the gentle (and odd) nature of the music.
16 January 2006Beyond the Echo Chamber
Isn’t it more useful to read a list of 10 albums that you’ve never heard of than to read one more list of the same 10 albums that you already know are supposed to be ‘important’?
10 January 2006Comfort Music
Repetition isn’t always a sign of being stuck in a rut. Sometimes it’s the mark of someone who has built his or her own distinctive musical world and is working within it.
2 January 2006The Capstan Shafts - The Sun Don’t Get Things Done EP (Ladder the Christmas Monkey)
THE CAPSTAN SHAFTS are no mere GUIDED BY VOICES rip-off. Ultimately what makes their music so compelling isn’t the style of it, but the songs.
28 December 2005Listen Close
How much music can one person listen to? Sometimes I feel like I’m testing that boundary.
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