Music reviews. CD reviews. Critically hip!

A Fine Frenzy is the musical offering of 21-year-old Alison Sudol, a wan softly melancholy redhead with a wide smile and a look tailor-made for an autumn catalogue. Her debut album, One Cell in the Sea, is 14 songs of alternative pop and indie soul which lifts and rocks the ...

Arrica Rose and the . . .’s newest offering, Last Night on Earth, is a darkly fun, lightly melancholy bit of retro-modern alternative pop just five tracks long. With a breathy cry vaguely reminiscent of Cowboy Junkies’ Margot Timmins (maybe due to Arrica’s regular gargles with apple cider vinegar), Arrica ...

Groovy guitar, soulful bass and sincere singing make Roll Away a good debut album for Back Door Slam, composed of Davy Knowles (vocals, guitar), Adam Jones (bass) and Ross Doyle (drums). The band clearly is going for a high energy blues rocking sound and it suits them well. With splashes ...

Bottom Of The Hudson are not who they claim to be. Okay, maybe they are, but they fooled me. Upon receiving their newest release, Fantastic Hawk, I had expected an energetic, sketchy, noise rock album, and after listening to the records opening song, you can imagine my surprise. With all ...

When the dust settles and the smoke clears, the powers that be have no clue what to do with Inspirational/Christian music. Part of this is willful ignorance: they don’t want to know about it, and they don’t want you to know about it, either. Here is the logic: they don’t ...

Endtime ballads.  This is the self described essence of Crippled Black Phoenix's A Love of Shared Disasters.  At its heart, this band is a collaboration started by Justin Greaves of the immensely heavy Electric Wizard.  Joining him are members of many other bands including Mogwai, Pantheist, and Portishead.  Needless to ...

Reviewing the debut album from this South Carolina band was difficult.  It wasn't difficult because the album was complex and hard to listen to or understand.  The album was hard to review because the members of  Deepfield have recorded an album which is perfectly crafted and tailored towards great mainstream ...

Ok, let’s start by saying I just turned forty-two.  I’m old enough to be a parent to almost every one of the fans at this show, older even than most of the parents who occasionally slip in and out of frame as the cameras pan the first couple rows of ...

"Tonic" frontman Emerson Hart takes a stab at the solo career track with his first release, Cigarettes and Gasoline. Listening to first single released from the album, If You’re Gonna Leave, it seems pretty clear who the primary songwriter was in "Tonic," as the track could have been ripped from ...

Christian Rock. Still with me? Good. A lot of people drop out as soon as they see the word “Christian.” I’m not a Christian, per se --- I’m spiritual, but not religious --- but listening to Christian rock isn’t going to hurt me, or you, anymore than listening to heavy metal. ...

Frank Black in the godfather of alternative rock. Kurt Cobain acknowledged as much when he stated that Nirvana was his attempt to rip off Black’s Pixies project. Chris Carter, in his brilliant, under appreciated series Millennium, paid tribute to him by naming the brooding, haunted lead character after him. If ...

Ghoulies Are Gone!  It’s time to say goodbye to the Groovie Ghoulies (1989-2007) who provide their own eulogy with their last bare-bones horror punk album 99 Lives.  Though it’s a funeral, there’s nothing sad about this album.  The Sacramento band, whose current lineup includes Kepi (lead vocals, bass), Roach (guitar), ...

Young indie rockers Hopewell hit the bull’s-eye on their latest album Beautiful Targets. Their unique brand of soulful and haunting rock with a splash of pop and alternative make each of the eleven songs a sweet surprise to the ear.The spacey psychedelic vibes of Radiohead and Pink Floyd that were ...

Folk music tends to be a form that is lost on my generation. It distances itself from bling and cars, and focuses on the dwellings of the songwriter's heart and soul. The only form of music that comes remotely close is emo, but even those bands are juvenile when dealing with ...

I'm not used to hearing the kind of music I heard on Jennifer Gentle's new album The Midnight Room but that's for a good reason. Initially I was excited to hear something that had been described as the kind of music you'd hear in a haunted amusement park. But what ...

TRYIN’ TO STAY POSITIVE by Jim Jacobi is an interesting concept, in the same sense that road kill, to a certain special mind set, is interesting. Protest rock set to a surf music beat. Even some of the song titles, “Vagabond,” “Bird Flew,” “Deck,” and yes, the self-explanatory “Brain Damage,” ...

I’m detecting a ground shift in popular music. Nothing major, like what took place in the early 1960s when The Beatles transformed popular music by bringing to the forefront a bunch of styles and influences that had been percolating underneath what had been getting airplay. No, what’s happening now seems ...

Keren Ann strings the songs on her self-titled album together like golden droplets on a gossamer thread. With hollow, echoing, ephemeral vocals, she spins her poetry in an imaginative combination of dreamy reminiscences and ironic cynicism. It’s All a Lie sets the tempo with a lyrical musicality and honeyed lament ...

Sit down.  Stand up.  It doesn’t matter, because this album has got it covered from end to end.  No exaggeration.  Kinion’s self-titled LP is the obvious mark of amazing things to come from a band that smatters dub reverb over reggae rock in a way that is as fresh as ...

Not quite like an Avril, Amy Lee, or Haley Williams, singer songwriter Landon Dunning shows us a glimpse of her talent in Defying the Stereotype. All the songs on the album were written or co-written by Landon herself.  The album is packed full of compelling lyrics, addictive melodies and Landon ...

Music with a message is something I typically avoid. If an artist attempts to push an agenda, I tend to push the off button. With their history of religious undertones, I was skeptical upon first listen… However, Lifehouse has managed to put together an album that communicates without alienating the ...

Kids have a lot of time on their hands these days. In fact, James Chapman from North Hampton, UK decided he had so much time on his hands that he could start his own band and write an entire full length album by himself. Those crazy British kids and their synths.We ...

Melissa Giges has a warm, rich voice with a lot of range, like Sarah McLachlan with a soulful shot of country twang and genuine R&B sensitivity. She pulls out the stops and uses that voice like a multi-timbred instrument in the genre-busting Far Beyond the Pacific. Case in point: Find ...

One of Michael Dyer’s multiple album releases this year, Nothing Seems Like What it Seems, is, to put it succinctly, a strange and often beautiful affair. For one thing, upon first listen, I thought there was a highly DIY feel to the production of the album. This sense was confirmed ...

I absolutely hated TOUCH UP by Mother Mother the first time I listened to it, even as I marveled at what a good, even excellent, project it was. I picked up immediately that the band had put a lot of time into it, and that it was amazingly complex. I ...