August 2011
5 posts
Ganglians - Still Living
Still Living, the third album from Sacramento outfit Ganglians, finds the group trading in some of the adventurous weirdness of their two 2009 albums for sunny Brian Wilson vibes. Falsetto harmonies abound and every tune is slathered with reverb. At the tail end of summer, it’s an album that perhaps attempts to bottle all of the sundrenched bedroom pop sounds that have dominated indie rock for...
Lenny Kravitz - Black And White America
Lenny Kravitz used to be the coolest dude in America. In the late ’90s, he got everyone into cutting the waistbands off their jeans, and he made it widely acceptable for guys to get nose rings. Between 1999 and 2002, he could do no wrong, winning the Grammy award for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance four years in a row. But, what is he up to these days? The man has not aged a day since his...
Toddla T - Watch Me Dance
Sheffield’s Toddla T - real name, Tom Bell, aged 26 - is back with his sophomore album, Watch Me Dance. A bit more of a mixed bag than 2009’s Skanky Skanky, Bell’s second album sees him splitting his time between Sheffield and Jamaica, and the result is, for the most part, an island-infused album with an English inner-city soul. His collaborators this time around include Roots...
John Denver - The Ultimate Collection
“If I had a tale that I could tell you,” John Denver sings on Sunshine On My Shoulder, “I’d tell a tale sure to make you smile.” It’s difficult to place John Denver in today’s musical landscape. He’s not country, and he’s certainly not rock ‘n’ roll. And as far as today’s folk movement goes, it would be quite a surprise if...
She Keeps Bees - Dig On
For their third album, Brooklyn blues-rock duo She Keeps Bees headed out to a secluded cabin in the Catskill Mountains, presumably to escape the claustrophobic confines of their usual urban setting. Their rural surroundings imbue Dig On - their first release since 2008’s Nests - with a sense of space, sure, but you would never mistake these escapist New Yorkers for natives of the...
