avant-garde Archive
03 Jun 2013
Album Review: Brainticket – Cottonwood Hill
Hype is a funny thing. Sometimes it invites scorn, mockery. Recently I received a press release heralding the latest album by “the most talked-about band of 2013.” As you might […]
06 May 2013
Album Review: Ant-Bee — Pure Electric Honey
Though it far too often is the case, avant garde music need not be chilly and foreboding. Sometimes it can be warm and inviting, while still maintaining its outré, weird-and-wonderful […]
17 Apr 2013
Album Review: Jeremy Steig — Wayfaring Stranger
In the very late 1970s – or perhaps it was the very early 80s; after so many years, I’m not entirely sure – I picked up a used copy of […]
05 Apr 2013
Album Review: E.Normus Trio – Love and Barbiturates
This music reviewing gig of mine is funny, sometimes. Not long ago I received via email a press release from a New York-based music publicist. The message covered a number […]
18 Feb 2013
Album Review: King Crimson – Discipline (40th Anniversary Series Edition)
From their inception in 1969, King Crimson has always been about creating outside-the-box music that challenges (or simply ignores) convention. By the middle of the 1970s, the band had created […]
12 Feb 2013
Album Review: Jah Wobble and Keith Levene – Yin & Yang
Not that anyone asked, but we now have an answer to the musical question: what might a Public Image Ltd album sound like without the involvement of John Lydon? The […]
22 Jan 2013
Capsule Reviews: January 2013, Part 4
Here’s still another installment in my occasional series of capsule reviews; today I cover rock, prog, industrial/EDM and…you decide. I had a huge stack of CDs deserving of review, but […]
16 Jan 2013
Capsule Reviews: January 2013, Part Two
Here’s another installment in my occasional series of capsule reviews, this time covering new releases by indie/self-released artists. My self-imposed limit for this particular exercise is 150 words on each […]
14 Aug 2012
DVD Review: Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band – The Lost Broadcasts
My music-loving friends (a redundant phrase, that) and I occasionally indulge in an old joke: whenever the subject of certain musical acts come up, one of us will mention how […]
24 May 2009
Album Review: The United States of America – s/t
It’s easy to forget that in 1968, getting weird and unearthly sounds on your album (assuming you wanted them; plenty did) was no easy task. There were no presets, no […]