Celebrating Community
The beginning of another new age. The year that’s just passed might go down in history as the one in which New Age music at last made its triumphant return. The media likes nothing more than a counterintuitive tale, and so a rapper long off the scene, André 3000, of the groundbreaking Atlanta duo OutKast, releasing a new age record—New […]
It’s hard to say just what a bassoon power trio should include, maybe hurdy-gurdy and viol de gamba. Brooklyn’s Bassoon’s got none of that, though. The heavy prog-metal Brooklyn band put out their debut in 2012 and somehow only now have decided to follow it up with Succumbent (Nov. 17, Nefarious Industries, CD and download). The band was formed in […]
A step ahead at looking back. In April, I wrote about Joe Jackson’s 1981 album Jumpin’ Jive in a review of Taj Mahal’s recent album of early jazz songs. Since then, Rickie Lee Jones has issued a respectable collection of crooner tunes, and countless rockers-of-certain-ages have done so before, generally with far lesser results than Jackson, Jones and Mahal (special […]
Who says a jazz band can’t play rock music? That question was implied, if not directly posed, within the lyrical permutations of Funkadelic’s 1978 “Who Says a Funk Band Can’t Play Rock?” Genre lines might be a bit blurrier 45 years later, but they’re still there to be crossed. Bassist Hannah Marks has worked for some highly regarded jazz bosses (Terri […]
A band everyone should like. There was a time, back in the distant 1980s and ’90s, when recording and distribution outpaced the spread of information. The post-punk DIY movement encouraged artists and fans to seize the means of production and make their own records and zines but there was no guarantee they’d end up in the same places. As a result, […]
Sonic revival. Concert performances by Sonic Youth were glorious things—transcendent, intoxicating, very nearly overwhelming. Sound systems and synapses couldn’t always handle them but the energy transference was reliably powerful. The band played what is commonly referred to as its last show on the WIlliamsburg Waterfront in Brooklyn on August 12, 2011. They actually went on to play already scheduled festivals […]
Cindi Mayweather succumbs to pleasure. Anyone who caught Janelle Monáe’s 2018 concert in Prospect Park (and reportedly thousands didn’t and were turned away once the bandshell grounds were filled to capacity) knows what a dynamic performer she is. She seriously enjoyed herself, putting on a tight show, copping moves from James Brown and Michael Jackson and gleefully admitting defeat in […]
Cruel to be Khanate. The biggest news of last month, perhaps tied with Tina Turner and the debt ceiling, was the first new album by “drone doom supergroup” (so says Wikipedia) Khanate in 14 years. To Be Cruel popped up without prophecy on streaming sites on May 19, with a CD and the usual assortment of buy-me-please limited-edition vinyl designs […]
There were some among the first generation of punk who decried the Sex Pistols for being so bourgeoisie as to put out an LP. Singles were punk: short, cheap and disposable. Albums were the domain of bloated acts like Van der Graaf, Stills & Palmer or whatever. A Pistols long-player would have happened sooner or later, of course. It’s the […]
The new books of Liturgy. Haela Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix has long fronted a powerful band. The first three Liturgy releases were impressive, intelligent, calculated and well-executed albums fairly entrenched in black metal. The group (of which, at this point, Hunt-Hendrix is the only constant) has since released a second three discs, and it’s with these—2019’s H.A.Q.Q., 2020’s Origin of the Alimonies […]