Albums reviewed, critically or otherwise.
When Emma-Lee sings, “I’ve bet my savings on a three-legged horse,” somehow you know she’s going to win. On her debut album, Never Just A Dream, the Toronto singer-songwriter bore her heart and soul with a jazzy-joyfulness that won over listeners and made them fall in love with heartache. With her latest release, Backseat...
Supergroups are all the rave this decade. Velvet Revolver. Audioslave. The Raconteurs. Chickenfoot. Next in line are the Monsters of Folk: Bright Eyes’ Conor Oberst, super-producer Mike Mogis, Retro-Nuevo troubadour M. Ward, and My Morning Jacket front man Jim James. If the gold standard is the Traveling Wilburys—and it is—the Traveling Wilburys they are...
Jónsi & Alex is Jónsi Birgisson, Sigur Rós vocalist/guitar player-with-bow extraordinaire, and Alex Somers, musician and visual artist to, among others, Sigur Rós. On their debut album, Riceboy Sleeps, they combine for one mother of a meandering glide through the subtleties of sound. The album started as a side project between Sigur Rós recordings...
These days it’s getting harder and harder to find something to smile about. Grin, the second album of Toronto-based blueVenus offers itself for consideration. Grin is a tale of hurdles; the overcoming of them, the outright avoidance of them, and the tracks of tears and smiles of the miles in between. The album starts...
Dredg is hard to dig at. Call them what you may—progressive, alternative, art-rock, weird—and it somehow never fits, like trying to squeeze King Kong into a pair of Abercrombie and Fitch jeans. Their fourth studio album, The Pariah, the Parrot, the Delusion, is heavy, the way things used to be groovy, or bitchin’, or...
Thrice is one of the best bands going. With their latest release Beggars, the band’s seventh studio album, they further establish themselves as a band who doesn’t allow its sound to grow complacent. Fresh off the experimental The Alchemy Index, Thrice has refocused itself on groove. Recorded in their garage studio, Beggars sounds like...
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