Rogue Habits

Album Review: Yesway's Self-Tited LP

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The spectres of folk music's past haunt Yesway's self-titled début album. While such a description might serve to paint these newly emergent songwriters as gothic miserablists, these spirits are very much benevolent ones, content to waft with a gleeful fervour out in the open air, before dissolving into dewy embers with the morning's first light. Sounds floa[...]

The Good, The Bad, The Inauthentic: Music of The Midwest-Folk Broken Down

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I'm British, and as such I'm interested in how, with the aid of the net, traditions from overseas have spread and converged with this small island I call home. Halloween is a good example – instead of dressing up as bed-sheet ghouls or plastic vampires, such as we were formerly accustomed to, we now dress up as Kim Kardashian, or Highway 61-era Dylan; such h[...]

EDM: Forging Derivative New Frontiers

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As electronica darling Richard D James, aka the Aphex Twin, returns to his kingly pedestal with much critical harrumph, something of a tribal clash has emerged on the World Wide Whinge, taking place between two different generations of music fans. In the red corner we have the likes of Aphex Twin and Autechre, the IDM (Intelligent Dance Music) crowd. In the [...]

Alfredo Rodríguez: Sounds of Cuban Jazz Space

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Step off your back porch on a late summer night, and if you're lucky enough to live outside the city and its caterwaul, you'll hear the rhythms of nature: crickets and katydids in chorus, cicadas keeping the beat, the stately declaration of an owl. This is nature's jazz. Rationally, the sounds would fall together in a odd intermingling, and yet, they fall to[...]

Dinah Thorpe: Lullabies and Wake-up Calls

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Due to certain musical prejudices I was hitherto unaware of hosting, the prospect of listening to a rap album by a white, assumedly middle-class Canadian songwriter initially struck me as somewhat unappealing, if not entirely uninteresting; an unsavoury mixture of musical bacon and ice cream. However, delving further always helps. On Lullabies and Wake-up Ca[...]

Album Review: Basement Jaxx "Junto"

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With the sudden re-emergence of electronic music's favorite son, the Aphex Twin, it seems that electronica/EDM/that car alarm sound (whatever you want to call it) is falling into a particularly ruminative period; a self-reflective time to allow genre-heads to recollect and examine the general state of the genre as a whole. Now, electronic music - repackaged [...]

Album Review: Cymbals Eat Guitars "LOSE"

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On their LP no.3 New York-based Cymbals Eat Guitars present nine unwieldy song-shapes, ranging from fast and breezy punk to dramatic, overlong experiments in sound. All the while such aural chaos serves to accommodate the unfurling narratives of songwriter and vocalist Joseph D'Agostino, as his commandeering vocal style more than frequently overspills the st[...]

The Noises We Make When No One Is Around

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As most likely the most terrifying piece of musical work created, The Noises We Make When No One Is Around oozes deathly echoes, voices screeching in agony as tormented banshees trapped in an intangible existence. The only one thing that comes to mind is that of the “hungry ghost” in Buddhism, one of the six modes of existence with massive, empty stomachs, p[...]

Sean Hayes

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Folk crooner Sean Hayes hums smooth soul with uncomplicated, yet consequential lyrics. He speaks truth in waves with abysmal grooves; loose funk with vintage rasp. With an inimitable voice, as heard in Subaru’s commercial with heavy hitter “Powerful Stuff,” Hayes presents maven compositions, but with an awfully connected, exceedingly genuine touch. He presen[...]

Eyes on the Shore

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There is music you love, and then there is music that becomes a part of you—their story, words and melodies are yours and become intertwined with your being. You exist in their realm and their music nudges you, or shoves you rather, into their in-the-moment bliss…or sorrow. San Francisco-based band, Eyes on the Shore, takes listeners on their journey through[...]

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