Music reviews. CD reviews. Critically hip!

1000 Miles from Home’s 6 song EP, Collusion, is a good, solid collection of songs that fits well as a CD to throw into the player when you’re looking for something different, but can’t put your finger on anything in particular. If you’re not blown away the first time you ...

What do you get when you add a previously unheard of language, virtuosic African drum solos, a Caribbean beat, a strong set of vocals and exceptional guitar playing? An incredible audio experience called Watina, the new album by Andy Palacio and the Garifuna Collective. This is an exciting and interesting ...

The first song on Brian Buckley’s For Her begins with a one and a half minute guitar solo that, surprisingly enough, both captured and held my attention. Buckley can wail on a guitar, to say the least, but there’s an intensity and urgency in those first few seconds of Little ...

Young California rookies Brown Shoe do a decent job on their sophomore album Vanity. Don’t expect any surfing bubblegum pop here. Although the band hails from the sunny coasts of CA, their sound is of another, better world. Instead, an almost polished British indie-rock is heard. Roaring guitar solos and ...

Bryan Ferry announced recently that he is not going to tour the United States in support of DYLANESQUE, his new CD consisting entirely of covers of Bob Dylan. DYLANESQUE: LIVE --- The London Sessions, a DVD of studio performances of the songs contained on the CD, will ease the pain ...

As I like to do ever so often, I screened this album on several people before writing this review.  This is possibly because I like to show off my pre-release goods at every possible occasion or because I can’t think for myself.  Assuming it’s the first, I was pleased as ...

ON THE FRINGE, Deborah Lombardi’s debut full-length release, mines territory usually associated with the likes of Tori Amos and Sheryl Crow. At least one of the tracks from ON THE FRINGE should sound familiar: “My Dog’s Life” was featured on the Animal Planet program Horse Power: The Road To Maclay. ...

Synchronized, the debut cd from the trio Dial, an alternative/progressive rock band from the Netherlands, starts out soaring in the heavens and ends up in the gutter.  To be fair, there are several great tracks.  The album as a whole starts out strong but is weakened when the band loses ...

Songs for Dark Days, the new album by Dori Turner is modern- folk--a woman with her guitar. This is not the genre of music I usually choose to listen to but I have occasional sweet spots for listening to artists like Bonnie Rait, Carol King, Neko Case, and Joni Mitchell. ...

A new Erasure CD? Oh, The Humanity! I had heard that they were no longer together, that Vince Clarke, instrumentalist extraordinare, had, uh, gotten married, to a girl, no less, and that vocalist Andy Bell was dead or gravely ill. Yet, here we are, in 2007, and a new Erasure ...

It is hard to describe this debut album by rock trio Ferocious Eagle as anything other than completely nuts.  Hailing from Portland, Oregon, these guys have created a sound that is primarily noise-rock in nature with a touch of the totally strange mixed in.  The band works as a tight ...

Graham Russell, if that name sounds familiar, was/is one half of the duo Air Supply. There was a time in my life that the moniker “Air Supply” uttered in my presence would send me into coma. That time was…well, yesterday. And today. And, no doubt, tomorrow. I used to break ...

Jungle noises, music boxes, factory clanking and arcade bleeps and bloops adorn the songs in Greg Ashley's new album Painted Garden. These sounds are totally ironic considering they are often introductions to Ashley's somber tunes. However, the beauty of this album is that it is all at once light-hearted, sad. ...

American journalist, "Greg Palast," wrote a book last year called the "Armed Madhouse." The CD, "Live from the Armed Madhouse," captures one night of a speaking tour Palast did in the wake of the book release, apparently somewhere in Florida, if the references to Katherine Harris and Jeb Bush are ...

Hide From Cleo is ostensibly a four piece band, consisting of Lori Keisler and Steve Haupert on electric and acoustic guitars and vocals, Jay Valley on bass, and Eric D’Aigle on drums and percussion. Their CD, COFFEE DREAMS & ACOUSTIC BEANS, however, sounds more like an off-the-cuff singer-songwriter project, with ...

It’s not that Ian Hunter ever really went away. It’s just that since the late 1970s his output has been sporadic, and, arguably, half-hearted. Hunter was always one of those artists who danced around the periphery of greatness; his Mott the Hoople work reached it’s zenith with the David Bowie- ...

Imagine all the people living life in peace? And imagine an album that could help? Sadly, the Instant Karma: The Amnesty International Campaign to Save Darfur featuring various powerhouse acts’ (such as U2 and Christina Aguilera) covers of John Lennon songs falls way short. What seemed like a promising idea ...

There is a subtle racism that continues to operate sub rosa in rock music. It holds that rock, with its predominantly white audience, does not have room for more than one black artist of a specific type. Lenny Kravitz is hot? No Eagle-Eye Cherry. The same holds true for the ...

I love when a musical act is able to simultaneously pay homage to a genre long gone and also reinvent its parameters and structure.  This is what happens with Jon Rauhouse’s Steel Guitar Heart Attack, an eclectic Hawaiian-tinged album of standards and lounge music that really becomes what ...

Singer/songwriter Judd Starr proves he is a man of many talents on his debut album Luminescent, which he wrote, performed, recorded and mixed himself, even doing the photography for the album cover. Catchy tunes and pop sing-a-longs make this album easily desirable.If I had to describe Starr in one word ...

For the first time in over 5 years, Kamelot have put out a CD that’s not based on the Faust myth, and isn’t a concept album. The result is, Ghost Opera, their 8th studio disc. On this CD, Kamelot has turned to a darker place, with songs about death and ...

Here is an album comprised of ten tracks; two remixes per song; five songs total, in the traditional sense.  All artists featured on Made: Gold Part I are home-based at the Made record label.Made Records is a label known primarily as the pusher-man of club friendly artists and ...

Mandy Moore has always remained more under the radar than Britney, Christina and Jessica, and she’s probably more well-known for her movies than her music these days.  Her debut, So Real, was unmemorable.  I actually liked her self-titled album quite a bit; you could tell she was trying to achieve ...

Motion Picture Music is a collection that spans over ten years of Mick Harvey’s music featured in foreign films. His musical talent has been viewed by the mainstream through working with Nick Cave’s band The Bad Seeds and now is being showcased in a collection that exceeds anyone’s expectations of ...

Much of this year’s so-called “indie rock” owes a lot to the vocal styling of one Daniel Johnston.  Minus Story is no exception.  At times I was anticipating an exuberant call to “Casper the friendly ghost” but it never quite happened on Minus Story’s My Ion Truss.  Instead, ...