Music Reviews: Vinyl

Unlike most "completest" or multi-disc sets containing every snippet of recorded tape that you might listen to once out of curiosity and never again revisit, this thoughtfully curated set covering just Nick Drake's debut album is one that bears repeated listening. It's been on the turntable almost constantly since it arrived shortly after publishing the review of Brad Mehldau's Elliott Smith tribute Ride Into the Sun in which the pianist... Read More

The Doors: a group that has more compilations than actual studio releases. Longtime fans will whinge at nauseam when an anniversary passes and the major label earwigs grace record store shelves with another ‘ultimate’ or ‘best of’ collection. Regardless of the oversaturation of releases such as those, it engrains the self-marketed ‘Band from Venice’ in the public’s consciousness, or subjects novices to the Lizard King ethos. Their discography is even more complex when... Read More

1975 was a weird year for pop music. The Captain and Tennille had the best-selling single of the year with “Love Will Keep Us Together.” Meanwhile, Neil Young was parked in the ditch, wasted at the wake on Tonight’s The Night. Just over the guardrail, Bob Dylan returned from his own surreal excursions. Queen released the biggest song of their career. While the Carpenters were snuggled up in their parent-pleasing inoffensive confections, Led Zeppelin dealt blockbuster... Read More

One needn't be an Elliott Smith fan or even know who he was to appreciate Brad Mehldau's rich musical examination of emotional light and darkness using the late singer/songwriter's creativity as a guide to understanding "visionary depressives" generally, and specifically Smith and his often sad and dark, but simultaneously uplifting music. Smith fans are legion, intense, and like Nick Drake, another "visionary depressive", even in... Read More

Amina Claudine Myers should be a lot more famous than she is. A composer-pianist-organist-singer of spiritual depth and grand virtuosity, she has been recording, as a leader or accompanist, for nearly a half century, but mainly for small labels and as a member of an alliance—the avant-garde Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), which also spawned the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Henry Threadgill, Anthony Braxton, and many others—that didn’t (and... Read More

In the heart of the Fishtown neighborhood of Philadelphia, just under the Market Street Elevated (‘the el’ as the locals call it), is a mural of text and visual interpretations of songs from a native’s album. That mural alone cements Kurt Vile's place within the city’s culture. Originally from the borough of Lansdowne, Kurt’s career progressed from creating low-fidelity bedroom recordings to the slickest-sounding nuggets from his home studio. Vile’s twist on... Read More

With superstar pianist Yuja Wang on top form, and conductor Andris Nelsons and the Boston Symphony Orchestra completing their Shostakovich cycle (available on CD individually or in a box), this vinyl release of the composer’s exciting, very accessible piano concertos rivals the best of the Original Source Series in its vivid sonics.  Proving that digital can be done right, is this a new Audiophile Classic?

Few music-related fair use debacles quite measure up to the “Frippocalypse” – a years-long period in which Robert Fripp’s team copyright-struck every King Crimson album review, meme, anything, posted to YouTube. I felt like I was walking on eggshells every time I reviewed a King Crimson album.Some of my peers flew closer to the sun; losing entire YouTube channels over posting excerpts from the Brondesbury Tapes.In the context of The Cheerful Insanity of Giles, Giles... Read More

Mary Halvorson is the jazz guitarist of the moment. The just-published Downbeat Critics’ Poll ranks her as #1 Guitarist of the Year, her Amaryllis Sextet as #1 Group of the Year, and Halvorson herself as #2 Artist of the Year (outflanked just barely by tenor saxophonist James Brandon Lewis).As if to sharpen the point, her new album—About Ghosts, her 14th as a leader since emerging as a wildly adventurous 27-year-old in 2008, her 4th release on the Nonesuch label... Read More

I think I was 18 or 19 years old the first time I heard Title Fight play. I remember standing in the hot summer Texas sun at the Mohawk on Red River street waiting for Converge to play, and all of a sudden this group of unassuming kids in loose-fit denim from Kingston, PA took the stage. They were followed quickly by a cohort of 20 or so teenagers that took over the crowd with the kind of energy that made damn sure everyone knew that we were watching the greatest punk... Read More

Compilations tend to carry a certain stigma: contractual obligations, a stopgap between releases, executed without consent, or labels ringing every last dollar from a catalog. Some are subject to scrutiny regarding imbalanced tracklists and why certain songs were included or excluded. Regardless of intent, it provides curious fans with an ‘all-in-one’ primer, or sways the diehards with a dull obligation because of one exclusive track. Beyond the generalized view where... Read More

The Late Show is dead. Long live The Late Show. Last week, CBS announced that its flagship late-night show — launched by David Letterman in 1993 after his departure from NBC’s Late Night, and hosted by Stephen Colbert since 2015 — will end by May of next year. Not just Colbert’s version, which was never quite my bag, but the whole damn thing. Officially, it’s a cost-cutting move, but plenty see political pressure behind it. For me, it’s mostly a marker of time.As a... Read More

Readers of this website might look to me as an authority on classical recordings, but one thing that continuously humbles me is just how vast and rich the history of this field is. This is especially true for the middle of the 20th century, where there are untold riches of performance and sound. By now, hopefully readers here are familiar with names like Kenneth Wilkinson, Lewis Layton and Robert Fine, but learning the history of recorded classical music is to... Read More

The Surrounding Green is Fred Hersch’s first piano-trio album in seven years—a fact that surprised me when I looked it up, since, in Hersch’s 40-year recording career, nearly half of his albums up until then were trio dates, befitting of his classic-jazz style and repertoire. The six albums between 2017’s Live in Europe (with bassist John Hébert and drummer Eric McPherson) and his latest (with Drew Gress and Joey Baron) have been an eclectic bunch—solos, duets, a... Read More

Of all the groups from the Detroit music scene in the early 2000s, The White Stripes were a group shrouded in enigma. Jack and Meg White played into their mythology, portraying themselves as siblings to distance their reality as ex-spouses in a child-like uniform of red, white, and black regalia. Working within strict limitations couldn’t contain the duo’s explosive sound, which embodied the brash garage rock influence from the Motor City, yet was soaked in bluesy... Read More

Charles Lloyd is still out there making vital music at 87 but consider alto saxophonist Marshall Allen! He recently turned 101. The Sun Ra Arkestra leader since 1995 founded Marshall Allen's Ghost Horizon ensemble in 2022 featuring Arkestra guitarist DMHOTEP along with an ever changing roster of guest musicians from the worlds of jazz and rock including Immanuel Wilkins, The War on Drugs' drummer Charlie Hall, "divine" saxophonist James Brandon... Read More

To peer through the lens of one of Elliott Smith’s key influences for a moment: everyone knows when an artist has made their Rubber Soul, White Album, or Let It Be. Rubber Souls are transitional — exotic, quixotic dispatches from early creative growth spurts. White Albums are post-genre, post-everything info dumps — essentially kits that dare you to build your own record. As for a band’s eventual demise, Let It Bes show the writing on the wall. And then there’s Sgt.... Read More