Blog: PopMatters

Falling in and out of love sounds perfectly lovely with Strawberry Whiplash. After a series of EPs, Strawberry Whiplash finally has its full-length debut out with Hits in the Car. It's an immediately catchy indie-pop album, strong on melodies, with the right amount of fuzz and reverb texturing things up. Given the bright feel of much of the album, the narrative progression might not be as immediately apparent. The disc tracks the life of a romantic relationship in two-and-a-half-minute nuggets. There's a emotional drain in the album's...

Cornetist Rob Mazurek and percussionist Chad Taylor have been at this Chicago Underground thing for a long time now, yet they still sound refreshingly bizarre. Did you know that Rob Mazurek and Chad Talyor have been inflating and deflating the Chicago Underground balloon for 15 years now? It's honestly hard to keep track of. Sometimes they were a duo. Other times they were a trio. Sometimes that trio would have a fourth member but they wouldn't get around to calling themselves a quartet until a few albums later. Then at one point Mazurek and Taylor said "screw it, we're [...]

Touching on the most conventional aspects of EDM and Americanized dubstep, both Salva and Grenier fail to find a spark. Making EDM interesting is always a challenge, so when you find two of the biggest proprietors the genre has collaborated, it's hard to expect anything that differs from the stagnant norm. What's most surprising about this collaboration is the fleeting moments that seem ready to form something of genuine interest or originality making the retreat back into the standard dance mode all the more frustrating. It only happens twice on each track but the devotion...

Star Tribune (Minneapolis) (MCT) -- MINNEAPOLIS - The controversial Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction of Guns N' Roses is behind him. So, too, are Scott Weiland and Velvet Revolver. Finally, Slash can enjoy life in a band that's not dysfunctional. "It's really liberating. It's so stress-free," said the iconic guitarist. "Everybody is happy doing what they're doing. There isn't a lot of drama and fussing. It's been a long time coming, I suppose." Then he laughed. The band...

Stupid Dream's eighth track, "Baby Dream in Cellophane", is a unique little experiment in that it merges Porcupine Tree's early psychedelic sonic with Steven Wilson's love of Beach Boys-styled vocal harmonies. Porcupine Tree's 1991 debut, On the Sunday of Life . . ., is rather odd to look back on after hearing the group's newest outings. There's not a lick of metal to be heard, and its absurd psychedelic humor has long since faded. (example: the initials of "Linton Samuel Dawson" are . . .). The majority of the album's 75-minute length is made up of bizarre experiments, [...]

Neil Young has reunited with his old band Crazy Horse for a new album Americana that offers covers of classic American folk tunes. Neil Young has reunited with his old band Crazy Horse for a new album Americana that offers covers of classic American folk tunes. "She'll Be Coming Round The Mountain" and "Oh Susannah" are two such tunes, ones that everyone on this side of the pond knows almost instinctively. Reprise has already released videos for both songs done in early film style. Videos after the jump.

Animal Collective has just announced that their latest album, CENTIPEDE Hz, will be releasing this September via Domino Records...

Blues, gospel, and jazz singer Ruther Foster spent so much time on the road that her songwriting suffered -- yet the folk, Stax soul, and gospel that accompanied the sound of tires spinning on asphalt gave her a different kind of musical inspiration. Ruthie Foster is an American blues and gospel singer who manages to live independently, hovering between those two musical traditions. She orbits between the two worlds, but touches down in her music to honor both. Her latest album Let It Burn, differs from her previous releases. Rather than containing nine or ten original compositions with one [...]

Bloom should be to the year 2012 what Loveless was to 1991, or Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was to 2002, or Funeral was to 2004: a landmark release. Baltimore's Alex Scally and Victoria Legrand are in an enviable position. As the dream pop duo Beach House, they've released three excellent records - they've never turned in anything mediocre - that have gradually racked up sales in exponential numbers (2006's Beach House sold 24,000 copies, 2008's Devotion moved 49,000 units and 2010's breakthrough Teen Dream racked up 137,000 copies) and the group has moved [...]

Ian Anderson, who has cycled through sidemen the way his more hedonistic compatriots once speed-dialed through dealers, has yet another cast of characters for this recording. However unwittingly, Ian Anderson wrote his artistic epitaph all the way back in 1976. "Too Old to Rock 'n' Roll: Too Young To Die!", the hit from the album of the same name, used music as a metaphor (or vice versa) where he, understandably, wondered if -- or when -- a musician might be reasonably expected to retire. The answer, of course, has always been straightforward: when the musician feels like it. Whether [...]

The OneTwoThreeFour EP sounds like a band that never went on a rather lengthy hiatus, and they take some iconic material and make it their own. It's fitting that the seminal late '80s/early '90s American quasi-shoegazer band Black Tambourine have finally come out of retirement after some 20-plus years to release an EP, notwithstanding a set of songs they recorded for their 2010 eponymous retrospective record. It's fitting, considering the entire Black Tambourine catalogue was issued initially either on seven-inch singles or compilations, so the fact that their first bona fide reunion statement is a four song [...]

Just when you thought they were gone, Belgian electro-industrial come raging back with their first new album in over a decade... Much like herpes. Belgian producer Praga Khan and his menagerie of well-lubricated sex maniacs have been at this electro-industrial thing for over 20 years. True to form, the palette used for Deep Chills, their first album since 2001's Farstucker, would not surprise anyone who was blown away in 1991 by "I Sit On Acid" or scared orgasmic in 1994 by their gold record selling VooDoo-U. In many respects, that's totally fine. Lords of Acid are legends in the...

Saxophonist Kenny Garrett's latest studio effort, his most cohesive release to date, is a sprawling work that serves as a nice summary of his impressive career. Saxophonist Kenny Garrett's last studio album, 2006's Beyond the Wall, is easily one of the most enjoyable jazz releases of the last decade. Soulful, warm, and accessible, that effort deftly toed the magical tightrope between post-bop and the avant-garde. It's true that Beyond the Wall didn't push any of the boundaries Garrett may have purported or offer many new ideas, but its top-notch performances, infectious melodies, and propulsive rhythms resulted in something truly [...]

Another compelling journey South from Kate Campbell. "Boarding now; going South." So sings Kate Campbell on "Montgomery to Mobile", the fourth track on her new album, 1000 Pound Machine. The South, of course, is where Campbell's music has always headed, and where it's sprung from. Across the albums she's recorded since her 1995 debut Songs From The Levee, the Mississippi-raised Campbell has crafted incisive, evocative songs that tell vivid stories rooted in the past and present of her native South. Drawing upon...

Recorded as an extension of the band At the Spine, the Beautiful Sunsets' full-length proves to be more than worth the separate division in the project. Mike Spine is restless and relentless. There's really no overlooking this fact in the face of Coalminers & Moonshiners. Its very existence is owed to that fact. Spine simply had too much great material on his plate that didn't fit in with his excellent main project, punk band At the Spine. That he decided to go ahead and release the down-trodden low-key folk songs as a separate entity is a very welcome surprise, [...]

Dream Seeds is the worst case scenario of a concept album, it's laughably over-wrought and horrendously uninspired. What's so bad about Dream Seeds? Well, for starters, nearly everything. Not only is this some of the most trite and over-indulgent songwriting I've ever come across, the church pastor-meets-aspiring-opera-si nger amateur delivery that its filtered through is painful to sit through. There's only fleeting moments of intrigue in the musicianship but for the most part the structures and arrangements are a confused mess that serve no real purpose. Those factors alone make Dream Seeds come...

Vancouver five-piece sound a little out of depth -- or maybe above their altitude -- on third album Little Mountain . In the 1960s, central planners in the Soviet Union established "science cities" where experts in various disciplines were gathered in a bid to supercharge society's technological progress. Much more recently in the other vast northerly expanse that is Canada, fully-fledged music scenes have popped up quite naturally and very nearly as quickly, producing in place of supercomputers and nuclear reactors a seemingly endless stream of quality pop and rock records. Perhaps foremost among these music...

Los Angeles Times (MCT) -- LOS ANGELES - Mention that Norah Jones has a new record and most likely an aural picture emerges. Maybe it's a hazard of success or having such a recognizable, lightly sanded voice, but after she took home five Grammys for the nearly inescapable "Come Away With Me" in 2003, Norah Jones' particular brand of song craft became synonymous with an understated, ballad-friendly sound that was always tasteful but sometimes a bit unobtrusive. "If there was...