MUSIC
Josiah Wolf: Jet Lag (Anticon)
Chelsea Martin
03.10.10
On the most recent WHY? album frontman Yoni Wolf sings, "I know saying all this in public oughta make me feel funny/but you gotta yell something out you'd never tell nobody." After five years as a backing multi-instrumentalist in his brother's band, Josiah Wolf, a classically trained drummer capable of some incredible riffs, is speaking his mind in his first solo album. Through a multitude of overdubs, Josiah played all of instruments on this sonic exploration of the dissolution of his 11-year marriage. Chelsea Martin, author of Everything Was Fine Until Whatever, interviewed Wolf and finds much to praise in the album but wonders whether the anxiety over the novel being supplanted by the memoir has its parallel in music.
A Boy Named Xiu
Mark Gluth
02.27.10
Xiu Xiu’s first album, Knife Play, felt new, an eye opening reconfiguration of so many thoughts, desires, and influences that it sounded like music you’d heard before, the way a platypus looks like an otter. As their career has progressed over a multitude of releases and side projects they have both refined and expanded their sound and lyrical obsessions. Dear God I Hate Myself, their latest full length, is available now. Mark Gluth is the author of a new acclaimed novella, The Late Work of Margaret Kroftis, on Akashic’s Little House on The Bowery series.
Best of 2009, Musically Speaking
Mark Gluth
12.29.09
Seems Limewire might have been a darling again in 2009, but If you could actually afford to buy any music this year, here are some of the best albums you might have grabbed up as suggested by Mark Gluth, resident of the PANW (Pacific Northwest as he explained to us) and author of the awesome new novella The Late Works of Margaret Kroftis. From Sunset Rubdown to Sunn O))) here we go...
Notes from the Brink - Reintroducing The Love Language
Brian Howe
11.14.09
Brian Howe gets a rather full scoop on a band that, while still on the rise, has already been pegged with a storied mystique and an expected sound. Call the eponymous The Love Language a debut of lo-fi heartbreak if you must, but frontman Stuart McLamb and company have whipped up music some say is as big as Big Star, as anthemic as Arcade Fire or as classic as a Guided by Voices gem, and LL brings it with a patchwork wall of sound that only makes one wonder what the next, perhaps more refined, Merge Records LP will bring. But no pressure folks, really...Yeah right.
Arthur Russell Revived: Hold On To Your Dreams
Thom Donovan
10.25.09
We've seen a major reexamination, recently, of the work of the late, esteemed, multifaceted musician Arthur Russell, through a biopic film, a record label dedicating to releasing unreleased, rare and reissued material, and a new biography in the bookstores; the poetic brilliance of Arthur Russell is alive and well for a new generation. Thom Donovan looks at the entire scope of the Russell revision on the heals of the biography by Tim Lawrence, Hold On To Your Dreams.