Rating: 3.5 / 5 Reviewer: Kevin Hartford
The title track of # Zero With A Bullet is about a singer-songwriter struggling with failure, then struggling equally with the prospect of success.
Posted in Folk + Roots, Music Reviews, Rock + Pop
Rating: 5 / 5 Reviewer: Michelle Kennedy
As summer approaches music blogs explode with promises of “hot summer” releases, hype machines overheat and explode. Suddenly it’s very easy for a whole slew of excellent albums to get lost in the shuffle of big bass-y noise and Lady Gaga’s new video.
Posted in Folk + Roots, Music Reviews, Rock + Pop
Rating: 2 / 5 Reviewer: Kevin Hartford
The Pernice Brothers’ fifth studio album, Goodbye, Killer, is the musical equivalent of a bowl of regular-flavour oatmeal. There’s a lot of nutrition in that bowl – vitamins, complex carbohydrates, fiber – but without sugar and flavouring it’s sort of just a bunch of beige-coloured mush.
Posted in Folk + Roots, Music Reviews, Rock + Pop
Rating: 3.5 / 5 Reviewer: Trent Depue
In the last four years, Portland’s Blitzen Trapper has probably been as busy as any band you can name. With a release of some kind every year in that time
Posted in Folk + Roots, Music Reviews, Rock + Pop
Rating: 5 / 5 Reviewer: Kevin Hartford
Folksy singer-songwriters could learn a lesson from Nathaniel Rateliff. They could learn a few – when to get loud, when to stay quiet, how to harmonize, how to end a song, and under what circumstances a xylophone would be an appropriate instrumental choice.
Posted in Folk + Roots, Music Reviews, Rock + Pop
Rating: 2.5 / 5 Reviewer: Kevin Hartford
One Jug of Wine, Two Vessels, the split EP by Bright Eyes and Neva Dinova, was originally released in 2004 and is now being re-released with four new songs. Two of them are good.
Posted in Folk + Roots, Music Reviews, Rock + Pop
Rating: 4 / 5 Reviewer: Michelle Kennedy
It easy to picture Zooey Deschanel in an old sepia toned boudoir surrounded by everyone’s grandmother’s pearls and lace gloves; her inexplicably beautiful eyes sparking in the fading light of a warm California evening. It’s less easy to picture M. Ward there.
Posted in Country + Western, Folk + Roots, Music Reviews, Top Rated
Rating: 4 / 5 Reviewer: Garth Paulson
The Wild Hunt, Kristian Mattson’s second album under his Brobdingnagian moniker The Tallest Man on Earth, trades exclusively in your familiarity with its modest offerings. You’ve heard this album dozens of times squeaking through the static on the only radio station you can pick up driving through the [...]
Posted in Folk + Roots, Music Reviews
