Music reviews. CD reviews. Critically hip!

"Dashboard Confessional!" Sorry, I was playing musical charades while listening to the E For Explosion album Reinventing the Heartbeat. It's simple, you put on a CD by a band that no one knows aside from the bands spouses, parents, and coworkers and guess who they're trying to imitate on their ...

Having a famous father is a pain in the ass. Every time you do something, someone brings up your old man. I'm gonna do that here, but I'll jump off of it quick, so bear with me. Part of the problem is that I'm a freak for Don Cherry, a ...

Eamon O'Tuama is a.) a new type of prostate cancer; b.) a species of underwater life that tends to become ensnared in dolphin nets; or 3.) an Irish  singer/ songwriter who has released BEHIND EVERY LIFE, his followup to 1996's DOWN WITH A SMILE?  If you guessed Number 3, you ...

I first put Earl Parker and the Ravens’ CD Show me the Money in my car and after two songs took it out and put in something else. After forcing myself to listen to the album one time through I figured out why I wasn’t crazy over it -- every ...

Ok, I'm going to keep this short, which happens to make sense to me.   I'm 23.  Earth, Wind & Fire(EWF) is 38 years strong.  A majority of their best body-movin' stuff came out before I was born.   As a matter of fact, if I had to put money ...

Eat Sugar is a Cincinnati - based quartet --- vocals, bass, synth, and drums --- that is hard to get a handle on, even as you want to, very badly. Their self-titled, four song, EP brings to mind a bunch of different bands, all of them very, ...

What do you get when you combine two childhood buddies, who are also great musicians (Dylan Donkin - vocals/guitar and Brian Sagrafena - Drums), and add in a world famous bass player (Jason Newsted - former "Metallica" bassist)? One hell of a power rock/pop album from a ...

I had a sinking feeling when I started looking through the CD booklet of RISE AND  SHINE that this bad boy was going to be a turkey. Maybe it was going over the pages and pages of Ed Hale's liner notes and came across the line "I was looking for ...

You could probably gather by the cheerfully obscene title of this compilation release by Eddie & The Subtitles that it was loud, proud, antisocial and basic. Eddie and The Subtitles were at the beginning of their checkered career a power trio consisting of Eddie Joseph, Matt Simon, ...

BRILEY-FIED is the debut release from Eddie P. Briley, a Nashville by way of Miami singer-songwriter laboring in the contemporary country mine. He has the look down --- incredibly important if you want to make it in Nashville --- bearing an almost eerie resemblance to Gary LeVox ...

Like most Progressive/Power Metalists ever to put pen to paper, music to tape, Edenbridge is not without their talents and inspiration. "Arcana" is a sweeping example of such. Led by soaring, swooning and ultimately soulful female vocals of Sabine Edelsbacher, the music proves as timeless ...

Jazz purists might roll their eyes a bit at some of the showmanship former Cirque de Soleil violinist Edgar Gabriel brings to his new, Stringfusion, project, but they’d be missing out on a nice album that does its ‘fusion’ moniker proud. Along the way, Gabriel and company borrow from world, ...

The buzz that has surrounded “Souljacker” since its release earlier this year has been so deafening that you might think you’d need to put on a beekeeper's outfit prior to tearing off the shrink-wrap.  Now that everyone has hyped this album up, you may wonder, what’s it all about?  If ...

"Novena" is a term that comes out of the Roman Catholic lexicon. It relates to a practice not recommended for those lacking persistence. I may be a little fuzzy on the details, here, but the upshot is that on nine successive Wednesdays (or is that nine successive days?) the applicant ...

Eisenhower Field Day is a trio from Indianapolis --- just down the road about two hours from where I’m sitting, actually --- who have released a full length project entitled LET’S NOT TELL LIES with an EP, OUR TIME IN THE COLONIES, on a single CD. I was surprised to ...

In the third volume of his Overseas project, Norwegian bassist Eivind Opsvik carries on his own idiosyncratic  musical path. That’s not to say it’s weird, per se, it’s just different, the man has a compositional style that sets him apart. The basic sound might best be describes ...

The Seldom Seen Kid is not the sort of album I would usually endorse. As the fourth studio album from Manchester quintet and cult favorite Elbow, it first struck me as boring mostly because singer Guy Garvey sounds a lot like Coldplay’s Chris Martin. While I hate Coldplay because all ...

THE OUTSIDE is gonna take some getting used to. I am not sure what Eliot Lipp is doing here, if he is moving the electronica genre closer to mainstream, or even retro, pop, or vice versa. I initially put THE OUTSIDE on the system anticipating…well, what one ...

It’s frustrating to have to give a less-than-warm review to an album that seemed to promise so much. Listening to the first few bars of “Mirage,” the opening cut of Elisabeth Lohninger’s latest album, one is ready to be swept away. The Austrian-born New Yorker lays down a smoky-rich contralto, ...

I am not as up on the Japanese punk scene as I probably should be, so I come to Eleven Fire Crackers by Ellegarden at a disadvantage, meaning that I have to actually listen to the disc to form an opinion. What a concept! Actually, Ellegarden has been around for ...

Ellen Honert, a native of the Netherlands, originally decided to study jazz when she was a little girl. From there, she studied at the Dutch Conservatory of Music, but dropped out when she felt she wasn’t being given the opportunity to be unique. After dropping out, she met American musicians ...

There’s a problem with AMERICAN COMPOST by Ellsworth. It’s the second CD from an artist who has been kicking around since the 1970s --- he’s not flooding the market, by any means --- and the reason is pretty much self-evident within the first few seconds of “Back ...

Listening to “Rocket Man – Number Ones” was like breathing in a beautiful memory.  As each song began, I closed my eyes, took a deep breath and happily sighed as the music washed over me. As the arrangements drew me in with a smile, the musical journey began – a ...

If you’re an Elvis Costello fan, you might think there’s no reason to pick up Rock And Roll Music, a reissue of some of Costello’s best songs over his varied career.  But how misguided you would be not to buy this gem.  Besides the hits and standards from Costello’s career, ...

Elvis Costello is reinventing himself these days.  He’s chosen to look back at his long catalog of successful songs and put together several compilation CDs based around particular themes.  “Rock And Roll Music” – also reviewed on music-reviewer.com – is based on pulsating harder rock songs where Costello speedily makes ...