review Archive
11 May 2024
Album Review: St. Johns Wood Affair – s/t
An offshoot of sixties collectors’ darlings Nirvana, this group features that band’s Keith Smart. He’s joined on some tracks by Pat Martin of Unicorn; the core group of players backs […]
04 May 2024
Album Review: The Cyrkle – Revival
Remember the Cyrkle? No? C’mon; think harder. The mid-60’s group scored a pair of Top 40 successes, first with Paul Simon’s pop confection “Red Rubber Ball” and again with “Turn […]
30 Apr 2024
Capsule Reviews for April 2024 #2
There’s a real assortment of great new music that I’d like you know about. So here I present capsule reviews of five new titles in a variety of styles and […]
28 Apr 2024
Reviews: Five New Power Pop (or Power Pop-adjacent) Titles
Emperor Penguin – Gentlemen Thieves The hardest-rocking of these five new releases, Gentlemen Thieves folds in glam and other rock styles to create a memorable set of songs. A strong […]
21 Apr 2024
Album Review: Bernie Worrell – Wave from the Wooniverse
Musician and producer Bernie Worrell was a beloved figure here in my hometown of Asheville NC. While he didn’t live here, the keyboardist cultivated an ardent following in our mountain […]
20 Apr 2024
Album Review: The Westbound Sound
Armen Boladian’s Westbound Records was an important force in the funk and r&b scene of the late ‘60s and early 1970s. With Funkadelic as its anchor artist, the label turned […]
06 Apr 2024
Album Review: Wally Waller — Kitchen Rock
Wally Waller first found fame as a member of the Pretty Things; not long after joining, he was instrumental in the creation of the band’s landmark conceptual work SF Sorrow […]
05 Apr 2024
Album Review: Allen Ginsberg – Material Wealth
I will admit right up front that I approached this album with some trepidation. Strictly speaking, Allen Ginsberg was a poet, not a musician. And where his work did cross […]
04 Apr 2024
Album Review: Mushroom – Messages from the Spliff Bunker
A kind of indie-underground supergroup, Mushroom is at its core the brainchild of Pat Thomas. Combining avant-garde, free jazz and krautrock influences and textures might – to the causal listener, […]
03 Apr 2024
Album Review – R.E.M. – Up
As I’ve noted previously, while I was a major fan of R.E.M. in the band’s early (I.R.S. era) days, by the CD era, I began to tune out. Again, it […]