Music reviews. CD reviews. Critically hip!

Released last October, Ra’s Universal/Republic debut, “From One,” has already become a success with its first single “Do You Call My Name” blazing up the radio charts, and the band selling out venues throughout the US on their recent tour. Musically, the band seems to embrace not one but many ...

Ra Ra Riot is a promising up-and-coming indie pop band with loads of talent and tons of potential. While you may infer from their name that their music is rude and raucous, this couldn’t be farther from the truth. The band, at times sounds like a toned down version of ...

Dying is fine. These three words resonate throughout the debut album The Rhumb Line by Ra Ra Riot. After releasing a well received EP during the early part of 2007, John Pike-drummer, lyricist, and fine musician-accidentally drowned after a concert in Massachusetts. Instead of folding the band and moving on ...

This one brings back the memories. Rachel Sweet was a 16 year old junior at Firestone High School in Akron, Ohio, when FOOL AROUND was released. I had lived in Akron for fifteen years at the time, and something was in the air, the feeling that the town, a truly ...

I feel like everyone I sit with daily in the five o-clock rush hour traffic jam should be listening to this album; it would sooth the most impatient of beasts.  Ben Cooper of Radical Face has produced a truly amazing new album, in Ghost, with its delicate ambient sounds, light ...

Radio Junkies is the project, basically, of brothers Adam and Michael Scharff. Brother teams in rock aren't all that uncommon --- The Davies, The Maels, the Robinsons, and the Finns are but a few examples --- though the Brothers Scharff' relationship seems a bit more harmonious than the examples I've ...

Everyone would agree that there is no group that has continually reinvented themselves by playing with their sound to create very original music. OK Computer and Kid A are evidence that Radiohead is not a run of the mill, mainstream rock band; they are an incredibly authentic group who ...

Radium88, from what I am able to determine, is a British aggregation which is fairly popular on the underground club circuit, though I wouldn't necessarily call anything on ONLY SCIENCE CAN TELL US THE TRUTH, their latest release, dance music. I will also readily confess that my ability to differentiate ...

“If you aren’t from around here don’t come around here, I don’t know what you heard…be careful when you roam around here...” taken from the first track, Animal, a creepy chime echoing and intertwined with a hard bass beat, rough and in your face lyrics, this is no game, and ...

Love Behind the Melody is the sophomore effort of Maryland-grown soul singer Raheem Devaughn, a buzz worthy artist championed by the likes of Alicia Keys and producer Scott Storch. While he has already enjoyed a certain degree of success from his 2005 debut The Love Experience, this latest album could ...

"You've got nothing to say, and that scares me…" And so reads the last line from "Message Beneath Contempt," one shot fired among an endless array of sonic artillery geared to reduce radicalist movements to rubble. A raised ire leads to raised voices, arms, fists, and of course, plenty of ...

Eventually, when all the trivia and minutia get eaten up and the talk about music starts to really get serious- out come the rankings.Best album. Best producer. My pal Rip Rinehart used to insist on breaking things down to a best side of an album (I swear so he could ...

Ramona the Pest is a Berkeley/San Francisco Bay-area trio and Birds, Bugs, Bones is RTP's third, independently released disc. This four-song EP makes for a practiced "how-to" treatise on the art of writing really neat songs. Loaded with crisp, succinct and catchy pop tunes, Birds, Bugs, Bones is sprinkled ...

Ramsey Lewis has just gotta be the coolest guy that ever walked. During the mid-60s, right in the middle of The Beatles and everything, he owned Top 40 radio with a string of jazz piano trio hits. "The In Crowd," "Wade In The Water," and "Hand ...

Every so often there’ll be that rare find that sneaks up and bites you on the ass.  And here’s this band, Rancid Vat, been around twenty years… Twenty years!  Obviously living large in the underground, these guys.  And what a long strange trip it’s been… I’ll bet.   Originally an Oregonian ...

Paul Randolph presently lives in Detroit, but he has a truly international resume. Born in Philadelphia, raised in Sao Paolo, Brazil (where his father was a music producer) Randolph’s music is rich with influences which result in a stew of sound evocative, but not imitative, of a ...

One has to admire the ambition of Randy Jackson’s first solo album Randy Jackson’s Music Club, Vol.1. It defies classification as its 12 songs span the gamut of musical genres from country to gospel to R&B to pop and back again. Additionally, the featured artists are a mish-mash of established ...

When studying the cognitive power of Country Music -- and it is powerful -- there is ...

For a genre that is supposedly dying off, the rap community in general seems to drop at least one great joint every week. This week’s is STREET CINEMA by Ransom, a Jersey City spitter whose work stands a cut or three above almost everything else that’s’ been ...

Rasheeda is the self-styled “Queen of Crunk.” No argument there --- why would one say such a thing, unless it was true? --- though commercial success has eluded her, a situation which may change with the release of DAT TYPE OF GURL, her fourth solo release. A major component of ...

Raul Midon’s A World Within a World is a relaxed listen and a virtual showcase of his obvious love of all things George Benson, Stevie Wonder, and Bill Withers.  There isn’t too much wrong with that……except for the fact that it makes this album a tad forgettable.  It’s too much ...

Traveling at velocities that will often exceed the speed of sound. Lacking the use (or even the implied use) of any Steady-State musical theories. RAY CHARLES KINDA PARTY breaks the song-barrier… leaving behind eleven tracks, which can only be identified by title and not by the musical content!This is ...

PUT A FINGER ON IT by Ray Jozwiak is the third of his releases, a minimalist recording, just Jozwiak and a grand piano with his own compositions: no feedback to hide behind, no hi-fi, lo-fi, whatever. The result is an interesting array of jazz styles spread out over seven tracks ...

Razzor Dixxon is Dale Lepiarz and Doug Smith, a couple of self-styled “hippies who play country music.“ Some of the tracks on their self-titled CD indicate that they are also a couple of Nashville songwriters who, in the parlance of the country music industry, have been looking for “a cut,” ...

The last time I went through New Jersey, it smelled. That is about all I remember of my short stay. Readymade Breakup is doing their very best to get away from the armpit of the United States and onto your radio. Alive on the Vine is their second effort and ...