Mark Shikuma

The tradition of siblings in rock and pop often doesn’t bode well. Bad blood has risen from the Everly Brothers to Ray and Dave Davies of The Kinks to The Black Crowes’ Robinson brothers. To have two set of brothers in a single band is a bit over-the-top. However with the Brooklyn-based The National, the […]

British singer/songwriter Holly Golightly is a miner of songs. Often an admirer of lost, obscure melodies, she likes to leave the dirt and dust on instead of polishing them off. Welcome to Medicine County, Golightly’s mythical, gothic landscape, located somewhere in the U.S. South. This is Golightly’s third record with “The Brokeoffs,” which is essentially […]

The eccentric group CocoRosie, fronted by sisters Bianca ("Coco") and Sierra ("Rosie") Casady, can’t be criticized for sitting on their hands during the three-year break from their last excellent release, The Adventures of Ghosthorse and Stillborn. In between global touring, including a 2008 performance with The Royal Dutch Orchestra in Amsterdam, CocoRosie released a 7" […]

The Brooklyn-based band Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings has paved the way for other, often more successful "retro-soul" acts, namely Amy Winehouse (Members of The Dap-Kings backed Winehouse for her breakthrough Back To Black recording.) Subsequently, a number of critics dismissed this talented unit as being "revivalists" of classic ’60s and early ’70s soul. That’s […]

John Zorn is way out, too much. His prolific outpouring of compositions exploring a wide array of musical forms and formations, using a stable of stellar musicians, is overwhelming. To make it more confusing, Zorn’s cross-pollination of his own musical categories and groups, often blur these marking points. Even though Ipos: Book of Angels 14 […]

"Where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on."  — Samuel Beckett It’s hard to say whether or not the Irish playwright would have liked the music of Will Oldham, under the nomenclature of Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, but […]

Maverick Czechoslovakian singing legend Marta Kubišová, whose peak in popularity came in the 1960s, should be an international household name — on a similar level as Serge Gainsbourg or Asha Bhosle. However in August 1968, when Soviet-led troops and tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia, it ended all liberal reforms that had been implemented from the beginning […]

Filmed in the winter of 1978, the feature film Blank Generation makes for interesting viewing — in spite of the movie itself. The story, such as it is, centers on the unsteady relationship between an up-and-coming punk musician (played by Richard Hell, then leader of Richard Hell and The Voidoids) and a French TV journalist […]

The Scottish outfit Frightened Rabbit caught a mess of critical praise with their 2008 sophomore release, The Midnight Organ Fight. The Hutchison brothers, Scott (singer, guitarist and lyricist) and Grant (drummer, percussionist), packed the record with vibrant, raw emotion. The immediate live feel and sharp lyrics made Frightened Rabbit a band to take notice of. […]

and *Today, Tomorrow and Forever EP*  By Pete Molinari – Damaged Goods In this digital age, the EP, acronym for "Extended Play," is an oddity. In ye old days of vinyl, the concept of the EP was that it offered more songs than a 45 single, usually unreleased material that wasn’t on an album. The […]

When England’s Field Music, fronted by brothers David and Peter Brewis, released their debut album in 2005, they were known as a precise, quirky pop unit with influences ranging from Steely Dan to XTC. At times it seemed they were striving for something beyond their means, resulting in impressive failures. Their successes, on nuggets such […]