Music reviews. CD reviews. Critically hip!

In Your Dreams, Zachary Hunter’s third release with Wolf Records, is a mellow country album ranging from rockabilly to honky-tonk to sentimental ballads. The songs themselves—all 13 of them written by Hunter, who also co-produced the album—are mostly musically tight, but their performance doesn’t shine with all one might hope ...

Those of you who remember the mid-70s might have caught a syndicated television series titled "The Starlost," about a group of people in a giant spaceship who thought they were actually living on a world, and what happened when they discovered that they were actually on a ship traveling through ...

Now HERE'S some British music press hype I can buy! Every year, Melody Maker, NME and the like anoint a band (or two or three) as the next saviors of the rock genre, but few live up to the hype. In 2001, one the chosen ones was ...

I am probably less impressed by Zero Hour’s new CD, Dark Deceiver, than some of their past efforts. At the same time, I like it so much more than all of those albums. Paradox? Hardly.  Zero Hour has always been about ridiculously technical progressive metal, taking off on late 80s ...

Degrees of Separation, the new album from Zero1Zero, starts off well enough, a paranoid techno-tinged guitar line in the intro of the first track grabbing the listener’s attention right away. But then it goes downhill, and fast, as turntable noises compete with the faux techno material, and annoyingly loudly mixed ...

After the success of group's like Orgy, the idea of Industro-Pop and aluminized fashion seemed all the rage, then the movement sort of sputtered without much of a trace. Of course this owes to the fact that none of these groups had much to offer the mainstream community; Orgy, themselves, ...

Zoë Scott’s debut album is a sideboard full of paisley colored funkadelic folk rock. With a poppy-seed laced fuzz guitar and a breathy, brassy, twang-tinged voice calling up visions of Ricky Lee Jones masquerading as Sheryl Crow, Scott wraps us up in a lush wall of sound from the get ...

There has been a focus recently on what is being referred to as the "Arabic groove." "Arabic groove" refers to the utilization of middle eastern chants and instrumental styling in Euroamerican dance music, whether it be disco, trance, garage, or whatever. I can think of three different CDs which have ...

Zombie Ghost Train is an Australian trio that has been active for the past couple of years, touring like crazy (if you were lucky, you saw them in the U.S. for half a minute in the United States). They occupy psychobilly territory somewhere between The Cramps and Horton Heat, maybe ...