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Music, Print, Reviews

Top Tunes Thursday: Coldplay — Adventure Of A Lifetime

November 12, 2015

The track is joyful in a resurgent kind of way. Driving leads and a surprisingly groovy rhythm for a pop band (let alone a pop band of such drear and atmosphere) cloud your mind like the smoke from a caterpillar’s hookah. It’s relentless and irresistibly toe tapping. Jam packed into their wooing, if not predictable, brand of pop are notes of Earth Wind & Fire, Phoenix, and fretwork from U2’s The Edge as well as modern pop titans, like Pharell, Justin Timberlake, and Daft Punk, especially the latter, considering their recent poppy-funky love affair. I feel the song chip away at winter’s frost, and as frontman Chris Martin heralds chorus after chorus of “I feel alive again!” I can’t help but agree.

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Music, Print, Reviews

Top Tunes Thursday: Alabama Shakes — Joe

November 5, 2015

Stylistically, the track actually falls nicely between the two records, meshing cozy Southern hospitality with smoldering soul. The tune kicks off slow, enchant us with us a gated chrous across shiny pickups. Not long thereafter, the incomparable Brittany Howard welcomes herself to the track. At this point, it borders on the clichéd to talk about the thundering soul machine that are the pipes of Brittany Howard, but the vocal, as is typical for most Alabama Shakes content, truly is the star of the show. Murphy works the crowd like melted ropes of taffy, jumping from croon to croan at the pluck of a string. It’s a joy to listen to her work, and the crowd feels the same.

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Unleashed Wild Ones Take on the World

November 4, 2015

“Portland has played a significant role in our respective musical upbringings because of its incredibly supportive young music scene,” Sullivan explains. “When Thomas and I started our first band back in 2006, there was a very active house show scene where new young bands could play, learn how to perform and meet other musicians. It was a type of unofficial music training since our high school had cut all of its music programs.”

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Top Tunes Thursday: Fuzz — II

October 29, 2015

Ty Segal’s Fuzz looks to dustier paragons of noise like Sabbath, Wolfmother, The Hives and The Eagles of Death Metal and says “we’ll take it from here.” The sounds born within the mildewed and crawling horror swamp that is Segal’s musical brain can only be truly appreciated in the context of honestly curious rock exploration. When you’re talking about pushing the guitar to its structural and audial limits, about reaching to the very corners of our musical expectations and poking a finger over the line, Ty Segall is the only one we millennials can claim for our own. Like the artful goofballs of old (Bowie, Reed) Segall is relentlessly catapulting himself from project to project, with no love lost in between.

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Top Tunes Thursday: Edge of Daybreak — Eyes of Love

October 22, 2015

In 1979, a group of musicians bound by circumstance gathered in earnest to craft their first album. Calling themselves Edge of Daybreak, the album that was recorded, while finding little commercial success and almost no financial returns for its creators, was (is) absolutely laden with the sounds of the day from which it came. The players behind this record, a record brimming with vitality and an urgency for life, were all inmates serving out sentences at the Powhatan Correctional Center in Richmond Virginia. Reaping the benefits of a liberal prison music program, band mates Jamal Jahal Nubi (drums, vocal) Harry Coleman (adt. vocal) James Carrington (keys), Cornelius Cade (guitar), McEvoy Robinson (bass), and Willie Williams (percussion) crafted Eyes of Love on a budget of $3,000 and a little less than five hours studio time. Now, almost 40 years later, the Numero Group has re-released the record for our listening pleasure. Lucky for us.

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Mad Child, Back on Top

October 19, 2015

“I find that my music and my work is my therapy so the only challenges for me is when I go home and have too much downtime,” Bunting says. “That’s when my addictive personality can affect me in the wrong way. When I’m working, it’s good.”

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