I loved Salem 66 so much but we were never meant to be together. The band debuted, were successful and passed away before I was old enough to get into any of their gigs. I was a fiend for buying local music when I was growing up in Boston and dug their first few discs. [...]
Jerry Harrison’s Casual Gods was a big album for me. I had first heard a few tracks in the movie Something Wild (which to this day is the only Melanie Griffith movie I can watch without being sick) but hadn’t bothered to buy the soundtrack. When a full album came out a few months later [...]
Scritti Politti and Mos Def? The whitest white man in Wales teaming up with one the best MC’s Brooklyn has produced in the last twenty years? Really? It makes sense when you realize with every new Scritti album Green Gartside tears up whatever his band HAD been and turns into something new. Going from left-wing [...]
46bliss make their bones as a electronic pop band but the best song off their new album is more acoustic strum than beats and bass lines. “All Over Now” is that special category of sweet but depressing. Is the song a comforting lullaby or a somber dirge? The song benefits from a simple arrangement (even [...]
Whenever Kid Creole & The Coconuts come up it’s usually because “Endicott” started playing somewhere in the background. There’s no doubt “Endicott” was the highpoint of KC&C’s pop sensibility and tongue in cheek lyrics but the album before Endicott is just as interesting. Tropical Gangsters is much more swing oriented and jazzy, from the [...]
The story of Glen Gray and the Casa Loma Orchestra is a strange one. They inhabited an odd space between swing and jazz as the Roaring Twenties came to a close and the Great Depression set in. They were a savvy operation and played what people wanted them to hear. They were also one of [...]
Charlie Walker isn’t a big name in country music but sometimes all it takes is one song to leave a legacy. “Pick Me Up Your Way Down” isn’t even Walker’s tune (it was penned by Harlan Howard) but he made it his own. It has all the little things that makes me love sixties-ere Nashville: [...]