I know it’s been awhile since I last posted. Part of the reason was that I was traveling in warmer climes where time on the beach was more important than writing my blog (sorry but it’s true). The bigger inhibitor has been a lack of decent music to get excited about. Just this week I listened to the new ROSALIA album and The Regrettes EP. […]
I freely admit that I used Bing’s Translate function for the title. The French I have left from high school is not good enough for me to write a good title in French. I attribute my lack of language skills to one of the failures of American culture – our parochialism. American culture has become so dominant in entertainment that you rarely need to understand […]
I have to admit that I approached the new AURORA album, The Gods We Can Touch, with deep trepidation. AURORA is one of my favorite modern artists. She’s quirky and dramatic. This makes her exciting to listen to unlike much of the formulaic pop on the market. After hearing some of her more recent singles, especially some of the acoustic remixes, I was worried that […]
Back in the mid 1980s, a group of artists mixed new wave and punk with country, blues, and folk styles to create a genre called roots rock revival. For a short while, 80s style roots rock revival was a fixture on college and alternative charts. Groups like The Beat Farmers, The Long Ryders, The Blasters, Los Lobos, and Lone Justice updated American music to fit […]
Last week, August 2, 2021 to be precise, I had the opportunity to see Amethyst Kiah in concert at the Chautauqua Institute. Once of the great things about Chautauqua, is the opportunity to see bands one might not think to go see otherwise. Due to COVID, the crowd was much smaller than it should have been but that added to the intimacy of the show. […]
We are back into a cycle of singles again. Throughout May and into June we saw one great (or not so great) album after another bounding out onto the new music scene. These albums cut across genres, sometimes multiple genres, and included new and old artists. Whew. Since then, new album releases have slowed down to a less frenetic pace. Singles releases, on the other […]
When I first heard of Lightning Bug, it was described as shoegaze. Shoegaze hasn’t been a force in music for more than 30 years. That made for an odd classification. Unless they were purposefully retro, the shoegaze shouldn’t fit. Yet, a quick listen to 2019’s October Sky suggested someone knew what they were talking about when they were deciding which bucket Lightning Bug belonged in. […]
I think of myself as a child of the 70s, musically at least. My formative music years began in the 1970s as a pre-teen and then teenager. While I was predominantly into progressive rock and then golden age punk and new wave, I feel all manner of 70s music in my bones. So, apparently, does Annie Clark a.k.a. St. Vincent. Her new album Daddy’s Home […]
The beginning of the 1980s was a time when pop and rock music experienced an explosion of diversity. Drawing from the four roots of rock, new wave/punk, disco, and hip hop/rap, the early and mid-80s music lover saw so many new genres and styles of music, that it was tough to keep up with the choices. By the later half of the 1980s, situation had […]