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J. Blackwell’s debut album, Like a Place I Haven’t Seen, is poised like a wave of mellow country rock that threatens to crest, but never quite breaks. Blackwell, who co-produced the album and wrote or co-wrote all of the tracks, has a rich voice with a cry in the holler; ...

The fact that I have never heard of rising star J. Phoenix surprises me immensely. He has been featured on many a TV show and has written with and for some of the biggest names in the music business. Finally transitioning from working behind the scenes in the past to ...

Jack Conte only gave us four songs clocking in at barely over 15 minutes on his EP, Nightmares and Daydreams.  Fifteen minutes is not very much time from which to glean the full scope of a musician's talent.  Yet somehow Conte has  poured himself into these 15 minutes, focusing talent ...

Since I generally ignore MTV, I've never indulged in viewing their ultra successful Jackass series, though I have been warming to The Osbournes of late and hoping to hell I can still respect Ozzy for the madman performer he's been rather than the head of the weekly side show circus ...

In the midst of the breakup of well-beloved indie rock titans Pretty Girls Make Graves, the members have become a part of several different groups. In the case of keyboardist/guitarist Jay Clark, he teams up with Johnny Whitney and Cody Vitallo of also defunct punk outfit The ...

Straight from Philly is soul singer Jaguar Wright. The City of Brotherly Love has provided the music industry with yet another talented burgeoning vocalist. Alicia Keys has proven that strong vocals and ardent blues are still alive, and this album runs away with it. Jaguar ...

Jaheim may be the new “Voice of R&B” just like he declares on the first track of his new album Makings of a Man. Jaheim utilizes his soulful Teddy Pendergrass vibe to pump out more contemporary versions of the old school hits that influenced him. He manages a smooth, cool, ...

If, for some reason, you’ve haphazardly stumbled across this review, you’re probably asking yourself the very same question I asked myself just a few short weeks ago.  “Who in the hell is Jaik Miller?”   Well, turns out, he’s highly regarded in the thriving New York music scene.    And, he’s pretty ...

I initially thought that Jake Smith was a country artist, a misapprehension which was corrected about two seconds after I started listening to REAL, Smith’s debut effort. For one thing, Smith is signed to Rocketown, Michael Smith’s (no relation. I don’t think) genre-bending Christian music label. For another, “Get Up,” ...

I first listened to Jakob Dylan’s Seeing Things as I drove down the 101 south through central California. It was a bare landscape, the occasional farm but mainly golden hills, blue sky and not much else.  Dylan’s stark, stripped-down , Rick Rubin produced solo album debut was the perfect soundtrack. ...

The magical quality of James Horner’s work has been used before in such motion pictures as Glory and House of Sand and Fog. This time he often tends toward a woodwind approach to a nightmare tale of childhood proportions. The percussion is nearly absent as the score follows the movie's ...

I submitted to waterboarding a couple of years ago as part of a demonstration. I lasted about three seconds. It wasn’t torture, it wasn’t drowning, it was smothering and confining and if the woman who plays Ne-Yo’s girlfriend in the “Because of You” video (the one who ...

If funkiness is a word Jamiroquai knows how to spell it. "A Funk Odyssey," the fifth album from singer Jay Kay and his British cohorts, is a tour-de-force of the boys' musical abilities, and the result is a retro-fied album that thumps and bumps its way through the ears from ...

Let’s get this straight from the get go: Jane Monheit has one of the most astonishing voices in music. Period. Resonant and clear as a brook in her upper register, and warm as mulled wine when she goes downtown, one gets the feeling that Monheit could do absolutely anything she ...

I'm going to see Bruce Springsteen in a few weeks, and listening to Jason Anderson’s The Hopeful and the Unafraid is getting me excited for it.  Anderson’s album –lyrically and instrumentally- reminds me of Bruce Springsteen.  I don’t know why, but the beginning of the album starts off a bit ...

Sometimes, artists have all the talent in the world. Jason Meadows is one of those artists. But sometimes those very same artists have their careers stalled because they fail to incorporate the most important part of music into their palate: originality. Meadows, an Oklahoma native with extremely good looks, sounds ...

Each and every Jason Mraz album always seem to be suffering from an identity crisis - but not in a bad way. Right when you think you have Mraz pegged he crosses boundaries, blurs genres and has you wondering yet again exactly where he stands. On his third album, the ...

After the success of their first compilation, Jazzanova return with the follow up in Broadcasting From Offtrack Radio. They team up with DJ extraordinaire Dirk Rumpff to offer up a heaping helping of some of the most obscure music out there.While I am not a fan of most of the ...

I say this with complete sincerity. This album is great. It has a great R&B/Soul feel to it. The Jazzys draw from many different kinds of music, making this a very eclectic album. The second song, El Medio, is even sung in Spanish. I can’t believe this album; it is ...

You may have never heard of Jeff Alkire.  But you certainly have heard his style of music.  On his latest album, One Summer in Winters, Alkire plays the alto saxophone to such expertise that you’ll constantly be thinking to yourself you know his jazz beats from somewhere.  Whether it reminds ...

Confession time: I’m not a Christian, but for certain reasons, I’m exploring. Recently, that exploration includes grabbing Christian-related CDs from the music-reviewer.com’s virtual stockroom for review purposes. So far, I haven’t really found one that speaks to me. I grabbed the new Jeff Deyo CD, Unveil, cognizant of his former role ...

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 ...

Jeffrey Lewis has been creating political satirist-style folk music for years but 12 Crass Songs might be the most amusing yet. Before you can even begin to soak up this ridiculously entertaining album you’re going to need the background information. The band Crass was a highly controversial anarchist ...

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 ...

Just when one though that ol' J Lo was gonna dip permanently into the hip-hop domain that garnered the massive success of last years "I'm Real" and "Ain't It Funny," she surprises with a disc that is something she never has been: Dull! Save for the contagious "Jenny From The ...