Music In Review

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 […]

If someone asked you in passing, "What kind of music does Joy Kills Sorrow play?" any simple categorization you rattled off to save time would likely fail to properly convey all the musical textures the group is capable of producing. Bluegrass? Acoustic folk? Sure, I guess those work. But anyone who heard the band perform […]

"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 […]

Though the series continues with a new creative team and a new Doctor in April, these five stories constitute the last year of the new Doctor Who as created by writer-showrunner Russell T. Davies. They’re also the last starring David Tennant, whose four years as the Doctor turned the series into a major hit for […]

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 […]