New Reviews of Old Stuff

There is very little modern country that doesn’t cause my ears to bleed. I think it mostly comes from a notion that in order to be good, country music must be something more than top-40 pop tunes sung through the nose. An artist that gets this, in a wonderful way, is consummate honky-tonk master Junior Brown. [Read More]

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then 12 Desperate Straight Lines is surely a huge monument of devotion to other bands. I feel mixed on how to critique this album in so far that it’s actually a pretty darn catchy pop rock album with nice hooks and a light airy melodies that make you want to tap your feet. [Read More]

Regina Spektor is a recent pop obsession of mine. I first discovered her from some radio play from her 2004 Soviet Kitsch album. Since then I have amassed all of her albums and remain a dedicated fan. 11:11 is not Regina Spektor’s strongest album, but rarely are first albums the best albums. However, it already demonstrates a strong, quirky songwriting talent and shows off her incredible vocal range. [Read More]

From a recent favorite album to an album of my ever-increasingly distant youth. I purchased this album in a small record shop in Boston while visiting Harvard for a disastrous debate tournament my senior year of high school. I’m pretty sure that Dookie had probably already hit the airwaves by the time of the trip or I doubt I would have heard of Green Day considering that my musical diet at the time was a strict combination of grunge and rockabilly. [Read More]

So I do that long rant about reviewing albums that I haven’t heard before and then I start with one of my favorite albums of recent years for the first review. The alphabet can be a real pain sometimes. In any case, Buke and Gass (now Buke and Gase) was a band I discovered through the fabulous NPR show Radiolab. Buke and Gase consists of Arone Dyer and Aron Sanchez who play their homemade instruments including a Buke which is a baritone ukulele and a Gass which is a guitar-bass concoction. With these monsters of the junkyard, comes a captivating, driving cacophony of fantastic noise. [Read More]

So, with the demise of my Project 365 experiment, I’ve been looking for some creative outlets for which I can use this blog. I’ve always been an avid collector of music but over the last decade or so, it’s gotten a little out of control. I’ve somehow ended up with a music collection of some 18,000 tracks across a few thousand artists and albums. However, the sad fact is that there is a huge swath of this music I have never actually heard. A lot of it has been picked up as daily deal albums or because it was highly reviewed on emusic and stuck in the music library where it sits awaiting the day where it shows up on the random playlist. Well, when your library gets this big, the chances of stuff showing up on the random playlist start getting pretty small.

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