indie Archive
10 Mar 2018
Album Review: Ajay Mathur – Little Boat
In the years just before punk broke in the UK, there was a musical scene bubbling under that would exert an influence on punk while (quietly) providing a bridge between mainstream rock and its more jagged variant. Like garage rock and freakbeat, the scene didn’t really have a name in wide use at the time;
10 Mar 2018
EP Review: Arden and the Wolves – Who Can You Trust
If one digs deep into the music on Arden and the Wolves’ Who Can You Trust, a clear occult undercurrent reveals itself. That’s certainly a somewhat unconventional perspective to take, but the fact is that most everything else about this five-song EP released in January 2018 is quite accessible and (in a good way) mainstream
26 Feb 2018
Album Review: The Rough and Tumble — We Made Ourselves a Home…
The Rough & Tumble is the folk-Americana duo of Mallory Graham and Scott Tyler. These days the pair consider themselves at home on the road, but in the Rough & Tumble’s bio, the nomadic pair say that they “used to say they were from Nashville.” And before that, Graham (who was born in Pennsylvania) and
11 Feb 2018
Album Review: Fovea — Pencil Me In
The blippy synth lines that open “Boss Boy” suggest that Fovea’s Pencil Me In is going to be a synthpop album. But not; that impression is corrected after about, oh, three seconds. A gauzy wash of squalling guitars crashes over the synth. Okay, so it’s a shoegaze record, right? Wrong. The guitars recede, leaving behind
03 Feb 2018
Album Review: Oddnote — Oddnote
Heavy, riff-laden power rock arguably first reared its head in the late 1960s, with the likes of Blue Cheer, Iron Butterfly and Led Zeppelin. But the 1970s the formula was refined further, in the form of Deep Purple and even Uriah Heep. And while the style has gone in an out of collective favor ever
03 Feb 2018
Album Review: Jason Vitelli — Head Above Tide
Vitelli’s crystalline, classically-inflected piano style and clear voice give the music on Head Above Tide a regal, refined feel that may remind some of Neal Morse-era Spock’s Beard crossed with early Billy Joel. There’s a deliberately dry production aesthetic to the songs that conveys a kind of immediacy; listeners will feel as if they’re right
03 Feb 2018
Album Review: Eric Anders — Eleven Nine
It’s often said that the 1960s were the Golden Age of protest music. By the end of that decade, times had changed. The thinking goes that after the disillusionment of the assassinations of RFK and MLK, the Vietnam debacle and Watergate, Americans turned inward; author Tom Wolfe went so far as to coin the 1970s
08 Jan 2018
Album Review: Tin Roof Echo — Remember Every Moment
Tin Roof Echo is the one-man “bedroom folk” product of Joe Hooten, though the multi-instrumentalist goes to some length to keep his real name off of his work. That’s puzzling, as the music is of a consistently high quality. Hooten seems to sell himself a bit short on occasion: though he’s an avowed R.E.M. fetishist,
07 Dec 2017
Album Review: Angel Olsen — Phases
Across her first three albums and an EP, Asheville’s own Angel Olsen has carved out a musical niche of her own. Her music is perhaps best described as a collection of familiar, well-worn melodies and styles to which she applies her own stamp. Her most recent release of new material, 2016’s My Woman drew upon
29 Nov 2017
The Stump Mutts: Working for the Weekend
Asheville and Western North Carolina is home to thriving scenes for most every music genre and subgenre; happily, there’s a seemingly endless supply of Americana artists, bluegrass pickers, jam band noodlers, rhyming rappers, jazz musos and synthesizer wizards. But the Stump Mutts aren’t having any of that; the four-man group from Asheville unapologetically calls itself