Tag: new album

New Releases


Lucinda Williams – Blessed
“Blessed,” one of the best albums she’s ever released, comes as a relief. Produced by Don Was (who produced Raitt’s “Nick of Time”), the dozen songs on the album tackle complicated emotions with a deft touch to create profoundly moving moments. Whether it’s the sense of loss in “Copenhagen,’ about the instance in which she learns about the death of a friend, or “To Be Loved,” a tender ballad that every mother should sing to her children before bedtime (“You weren’t born to be mistreated/You weren’t born to be misguided/You were born to be loved”), Williams’ writing on “Blessed” is seamless. Read the full review on LA Times


Mike Watt – Hyphenated Man
Musically, Hyphenated Man consists of short songs in a guitar-bass-drums configuration, similar to the Minutemen. In fact, Watt said he was inspired by the making of the Minutemen documentary We Jam Econo.

“I had to listen to Minutemen a lot while it was going on,” Watt said. “We drove around Pedro and I answered questions and showed them around and we listened to music.”

That process gave Watt an opportunity to revisit Minutemen music for the first time in 20 years. “I didn’t listen to it for a long time after D. Boon got killed. It made me sad,” Watt said. “But listening to it was, like, ‘Wow, this is kind of interesting, no filler.'”

For Hyphenated Man, Watt said he wrote the songs on guitar and then built bass lines around them. “Sometimes I’d do that with D. Boon, I’d write a little on guitar, and he would take it and make it real,” Watt said. “It’s just a different thing than coming from the bass straight off.” Read the full Interview on Recoil


Devotchka – 100 Lovers
Devotchka’s triumph on their new album is the increasing synthesis of their many influences. You don’t get to yell “Wheee! Mariachi!” on this first track (and really, do you want to do that anyhow?), but that doesn’t mean the band’s drifting into more radio-typical sounds. All the previous influences still present themselves throughout the album, but more seamlessly than before. Even a more exotic track (to US ears) like “The Common Good” sounds less like one tradition juxtaposed with another and more like, well, Devotchka. Read the full review on Pop Matters

New Releases


PJ Harvey – Let England Shake
“The West’s asleep,” PJ Harvey declares on the first line of her new album, Let England Shake, before spending the next 40 minutes aiming to shame, frighten, and agitate it into action. When Polly Jean Harvey burst into the public consciousness in the early 90s, her gravelly voice, outsized personality, and often disturbing lyrics gave the alt-rock world a crucial shot of excitement. That early work is still among the most raw and real guitar music to emerge from the past few decades, so no surprise, it’s a version of PJ Harvey a lot of people still miss. But if you’ve paid attention to her in the years since, the one thing you can expect is that she won’t repeat herself. Read the full review on Pitchfork


Mogwai – Hardcore will never die, but you will.
Mogwai have hardly ever been as accessible as they are on Hardcore…. Only three of the 10 songs break the six-minute mark and when they do, you’ll hardly notice. The vocoded lyrics and steady click-beat of album highlight “Mexican Grand Prix”, for instance, are so enrapturing that the song glides on and on with ease. Track six, “Letters to the Metro”, sees Mogwai take a page from Godspeed’s well-worn book, painting about as movingly evocative a picture as could possibly be put together in just under five minutes. The dirge-like funeral march of “Too Raging to Cheers” again instantly calls to mind Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s signature movie score-like musical quality, but with more than enough of Mogwai’s guitar-oriented sound to avoid sounding too imitative. Read the full review on Consequence of Sound


Bright Eyes – The People’s Key
For every fan of Conor Oberst, there has been a moment when this precocious voice of troubled youth has come of age; to my mind, this really is the one. What sets The People’s Key apart from Oberst’s prodigious output over the past 15 years isn’t its lyrical density or conceptual assurance, but the taut, bright, propulsive vitality of its musicianship. This is practically a pop album – albeit a pop album about time, the universe, life as a hallucination and spiritual redemption. Read the full review on The Guardian