Music In Review

Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle is singer/songwriter Bill Callahan’s sophomore release under his own name. His near-20-year nom de plume of "Smog" or "(Smog)" has plainly cleared, leaving Callahan ample breathing room for space, orchestration and clarity to his songs. Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle may be his finest release to […]

Leonard Cohen has the ability to articulate the loneliness of the heart, even if situated in the center of urban bustle. Longing and sadness linger, as if his voice is articulating some form of beauty coming to its end. Having published three books of poetry and a novel before the release of his debut record […]

Chicago has a reputation for being a tough town. A Midwestern ethic infused (or grew from) this city of power and corruption, once the center of the nation’s meat packing industry, where immigrant labor was used to make the machine run. "(Chicago is) the only major city in the country where you can easily buy […]

Robin Pecknold, lead singer for Fleet Foxes, summed it up nicely as soon as he hit the stage at the Arcata Community Center last Monday: "I’ve really got a bad case of school-dance anxiety right now. It’s like this is junior high, and we’re the house band for the most uneventful teen-movie ever made. But […]

When news of your latest album is prefaced with "recorded in Wilco’s studio on an analog tape machine sold to Swift by Jeff Tweedy and featuring talented guests such as Mark Ronson and Ryan Adams," expectations are raised. Singer-songwriter Richard Swift’s Atlantic Ocean, newly out on indie-stalwart label Secretly Canadian, doesn’t disappoint. This is the […]

For those of us who have been attending HSU dance concerts for the past few years, there is no doubt that Sharon Butler has done a great job at the helm. But as I’m not a fan of long program notes, her lengthy pre-performance exposition included in every program drives me bonkers. There is a […]

Percussionist, drummer and composer Alex Cline offers one of the most dynamic and challenging releases to come out so far this year with Continuation, his first recording as a bandleader since 2001’s The Constant Flame. Simple definitions seem inadequate in attempting describe Cline’s compositions — contemporary, orchestral, jazz, Eastern, avant-garde. All of these influences and […]

Aptly named Beware, Will Oldham’s subtle and mysterious new album is not what it initially seems. Depths of strange light and dark meaning emerge with repeated listening. The cover presents a skull visage against sinister black, a pale orb of the title’s warning hovering above; on the back a surging planetary volcano. The palindromic catalog […]

Marianne Faithfull’s hard, troubled life has hardly been a secret. And her voice seems to directly reflect her long road. There’s a combination of beauty, sadness and pathos in her low delivery that calls to the ghosts of Nico (former Velvet Underground chanteuse), German actress/singer Lotte Lenya and Bessie Smith. So, it’s no wonder that […]

It is no misnomer that singer/songwriter Alela Diane Menig falls into the growing musical community known as "New Weird Americana" or "Freak Folk." What’s interesting about her segment of this developing "scene" or movement are the roots, which derive from British folk traditions, which in turn borrow from earlier Gaelic musical traditions, namely Scotland, Ireland […]

If we were to put the Oakland Hyphy movement and its precursors on a timeline, it would look something like this, according to Ghostride The Whip: Black Panthers social solidarity movement … city wide crack epidemic of the ’80s … MC Hammer … Too Short … Mac Dre … Hyphy. Narrated by MTV anchor and […]