Music In Review

Album by Fuck Buttons ATP Recordings I’m not entirely sure what a Fuck Button is. As a noun, it could be what you press in times of distress. As a simple statement, it perhaps expresses a preference for zippers. With an added comma, it denotes that a preference for zippers has been denied: “Fuck, buttons.” […]

By Hayes Carll. Lost Highway. "…sometimes it’s necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly." — Edward Albee, from The Zoo Story Though only in his early 30s, Hayes Carll seemed to have taken the long way ‘round. But his way. The Texas singer-songwriter […]

Graphic novel by Jaime Hernandez. Fantagraphics. It’s a commonplace claim that comic books (pardon me, Graphic Novels) are now literature. Jaime Hernandez’s latest graphic novel is typically engrossing, and may very well be literature, but it’s also a lot more fun to read than most "real" novels. The Education of Hopey Glass is as character-driven […]

Book by Donald Ray Pollock. Doubleday. Donald Ray Pollock’s debut collection of stories has some obvious antecedents: the trailer park realism of Raymond Carver and the comic Faulkner of the Snopes cycle, maybe even the drug-soaked prose of Denis Johnson in Jesus’ Son. Pollock has his own strong voice, though, writing intense stories that are […]

Album by Dystopia Life is Abuse Records Dystopia’s reign over the 1990s hardcore crust scene, particularly here on the West Coast, is one of legend, with its tattered remnants still clinging to the fading black denim of scenesters new and old alike. It’s not that their brand of acrid and crushing doom-ridden punk was groundbreaking […]

Album by Robert Forster. Yep Roc Records The story of The Go-Betweens is, to paraphrase a Jean Luc-Godard film, one of a "band of outsiders," one of travelling along the fringes of contemporary pop music, without ever breaking into the mainstream. When The Go-Betweens first started, they developed in the mid-1970s alongside more "rogue" Australian […]

Performance May 10 at the Van Duzer Theater. "That was cool," my 9-year-old exclaimed as the light went out after Hand Dance,performed by Parsons Dance, choreographed by artistic director David Parsons, a former principal dancer of The Paul Taylor Dance Company. Five pairs of hands were all that appeared, moving clever and playfully in the […]

Album by Portishead. Island Records Third is an unnecessary album. From the beginning, all Portishead needed in the way of legacy was a pair of albums that felt like they’d dropped out of nowhere — somebody’s attic, maybe, or rescued from the flooded basement of a bankrupt ’70s soul label. Portishead built songs carefully out […]

Album by Steve Reich. Nonesuch. Steve Reich’s work stands today as one of the pillars of modern music. Along with his contemporaries Philip Glass and Terry Riley, his exploration of the potential emotional weight of the cyclical repetition of music phrases in the 1960s and ’70s was not only one of the last great movements […]

April 28 house concert in Arcata. House shows often make a virtue out of necessity, providing a place for touring bands that sometimes can’t find another venue, and providing a more intimate musical experience. The erasure of the segregation between audience and performer is a central tenet of the punk DIY ethic as well. So […]

Album by No Use for a Name. Fat Wreck Chords. For fans of West Coast melodic pop-punk it’d be hard to find a better new album than The Feel Good Record of the Yearfrom established masters of the genre, No Use for a Name (NUFAN). When Tony Sly and Rory Koff started NUFAN back in […]

Album by Sam Amidon. Bedroom Community. The past several years have been bumper-crop years for singer-songwriters following down the path of what is loosely defined as contemporary "Americana." The folk songs rescued and documented by legendary musical archivists Harry Smith and Alan Lomax have found a resurgence and inspired an attentive younger generation. Again. Harry […]