Reviews by kuvien

Have you ever, as Bright Eyes sings, seen things by the light of day and understood how insane everything was the night before? That's this album, wrestling with memory, anger, and regret, a weary confession of condition and identity. This is how you get free of the past: you hang your laundry out to dry. By the warm light of dawn, you get perspective. When the bonfire fades to embers, what you couldn't see by the light of the blaze you understand by the glow of what remains. I guess you can't gain the wisdom to leave L.A. if you were never foolish enough to go there in the first place.

Everything about this album is amazing. It's bouncy, fun, intelligent, eminently singalong-able, catchy, quirky, indie, all that. This is as hidden as a gem can be! Just a heads up, though: whoever made these robot angels made these urban trash crustaceans. Ah, never mind. It doesn't matter. Does it?

Rather inoffensive to my sensitive ears....oh no. Is it happening? Am I becoming accustomed to Industrial and other similar genres?

Oh my goodness! They're demolishing a house two doors down, and someone is drilling or cutting or something, and he's just happening to be doing it in time to the track I'm listening to right now.

Gone is the Obeah Man and Baal and zombies walking in the daylight. Gone are the rituals and the flies and the fires. Instead we enjoy how Exuma uses his Caribbean music like a lens to focus on America, his emigrant home, singing about girls shaking their thing, about the subway, and NYC, and, of course, about Attica. One thing folk does well is call attention to injustice. This album is smoother and not nearly as freaky (or pagan) as Exuma's early stuff, and that's fine. It still resonates with all that Bahamas vibe, just a bit calmer.

What happened to you, brah? You used to be beautiful!

This is what music can be: not giving a single fuck while it expresses the human soul, reminding you that you have feelings and that music can evoke from you the most visceral and beautiful reactions. This is First Utterance’s black cousin.

Shamans are allowed to leave their huts; conjurers may step outside their summoning circles. Sometimes you just want to take a walk down the block to the street parade and see all the art, where even the most spiritually-minded man turns his head when love calls to him. If Exuma II was the night, this album is the bright morning after.

This is an excellent debut with a lot of passion and mystery. I dig the Spanish fire in the vocals, something quite unexpected in post-rock, a rather cerebral genre to be sure. I guess that's the flamenco nuevo elements underpinning the music.

The echoing, ethereal jazz fusion moments are what really grab me on this album. It's like some clarion call appealing to something beyond what the guitars can reach. Without this strange exploration, this would just be another guitars-playing-at-acute-angles album.

Basically a folk version of a brutal prog album with Greek touches. The name of this album is paying homage to a region of Greece known for its immigrants and its blending of cultures and traditions, which is apparently the root of the music you hear here. It is, in my opinion, most excellent that this band was formed in 2007 but didn't have a studio release until now because of their dedication to playing at festivals as they worked to preserve and evolve the Thracian musical tradition.

A former bar singer travels to Paris and records a heartfelt, if sentimental, album, but such sentimentality suits the gentle passion of the full vocals. Let the barefoot diva rock you as surely as the blue sea.

I have two friends who both kind of look like Bill Evans, but combined, oh my goodness, Bill Evans is their son! It’s so weird. So how about that piano? Pretty cool, eh? Actually the other day at work I asked my coworker if he liked jazz. He said yes, of course, and since he’s a piano player, I asked him if he liked Herbie Hancock etc. He name-dropped Bill Evans and then turned to the piano and started playing “Blue in Green”. All right then.

Don't come here looking for spice or a challenge. You won't find it. What you will find it something to go nicely with a quiet moment in a room by yourself, perhaps while reading or enjoying your morning coffee. This is jazz from another time, another place. No raunchiness or grittiness here. Just class with a light piano and tasteful touches on the bass. Almost no drums, notable by their absence.

Bouncy, complex, fun, old-school jazz before the infusion of rock elements came along (despite the prominence of the guitar). And a high number of individuals to be working with, too--14 in all--adding to the overall complexity. Seems like everyone has a moment to shine, though.

Imagine ghosts howling around you, and the only way to force them back to their unquiet rests is by drumming them back. You must make a music wilder than their grief. Every open, unfilled space of creaks and pops is the grave earth settling.

I’m more into the avant and freakier sides of jazz, but I never discount cool jazz albums like this, because you cannot have the oasis without the desert. Sometimes it’s nice to come in from the howling wind of Davis or the sandstorm of Coltrane and just sit in peace for a while.

An underrated, unknown gem. A lot of songs about old age and world weariness, and more than two songs about lonely women who drink themselves into a stupor to forget their pain. Snatches of pastoral perfection. Excellent bedroom guitar playing here, too. A real treat!

Hillbilly Breton Celtic Folk

When you pit your robot against your opponents', no matter how much you prepare, the vagaries of the factory's machinations will almost always fuck up your plan. It all begins with a bad shuffle, disorienting you, sending you off into directions you didn't anticipate, sometimes sending you straight into a hole. And once the conveyor belts start moving, who knows where your robot will end up? Smashed into spare parts? Firing lasers in the back of your opponents' robots? Spinning your wheels as you ram your head against a steel wall? Probably all of the above.

As I spanked a woman lazing in a tree branch, I wept softly knowing that Joanna Newsom was looking down on my activity with jealousy. What Ms. Newsom fails to understand is that what happens in Brazil stays in Brazil.