JC Brooks & the Uptown Sound have a reputation for wild and sassy performances and great songwriting potential. Their frontman oozes style and panache. Their latest record, Howl, has been unleashed with a promise to ignite, electrify and rock us all to the core. Alas. While Howl is not a whimper, it doesn’t quite deliver on a full soul shakedown.
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You roll out of bed, much too late. Or is it early? Hell, who knows what time it is. You don’t bother to dress. You just stumble across the room and catch an unsettling glance from the mirror. Your glance. You are reminded that you are, and when you are you can feel. Shit, that’s the last thing you want to do, especially now. You could go back to bed, but this will all just happen again. You’ve got to push on, to find a way to work through it all. It will feel different soon. But for now, that notion is just a story someone tells you.
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Posted in High Fidelity, Reviews
It seems especially true nowadays, with the kind of access creative types have to different artistic mediums, that they are rarely satisfied with just one. This isn’t a crime in and of itself, of course, especially not if the endeavors into different artistic avenues prove successful. This being said, SQÜRL, the self-titled debut EP of a band featuring noted filmmaker and writer Jim Jarmusch, isn’t a crime. However, it is apparent in these four tracks— three and a half really, but more on that later—that he and his bandmates, Carter Logan and producer/engineer Shane Stoneback, aren’t afraid to push the same kind of buttons Jarmusch pushes within the confines of his films.
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Releasing their self-titled debut album in 2008, Vampire Weekend immediately leapt from college dorm parties to indie fame. Their upbeat pep blended international rhythms with tales of campus romance and Cape Cod summers. Contra, the 2010 follow-up, graciously sidestepped a sophomore slump, and continued both the sound and themes established the first time around. With Modern Vampires of the City, Vampire Weekend hang up their collar-popped polos and graduate.
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Kate Nash has undergone a vast transformation in her performance persona. The odd part about that is what she was before—a largely prototypical, mainstream pop singer confection with an appropriate amount of British ‘tude. Over time, Nash has evolved into herself, eschewing the super saccharine, bubblegum, inoffensive demeanor for something a little closer to what can be described as ’90s alt girl/counter culture. She’s not necessarily anti-fashion, but more an embracement of girlish geekery. She wraps her arms firmly around a woman’s ability to draw outside the lines and being beautiful without even remotely being conventional. It is spunky, charming and often silly in a tongue-in-cheek way.
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Every once in a generation, a simple singer-songwriter comes along that can mesmerize an audience through nothing but poetic lyricism and soulful ruminations on life and love. Laura Marling could very well be that voice for our generation. What she lacks in showy over-the-top theatrics she makes up for ten-fold in untarnished, raw, emotive power. One song deep into her set at the famous Hollywood Forever Cemetery’s Masonic Lodge and it’s painfully apparent how innately talented she is as a performer and an artist, and just how banal so many singer songwriters are in comparison.
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With all the whistles and screams for “Hanni!” you’d have thought he was headlining this final show with the Black Angels. Los Angeles musician Hanni El Khatib brought a load of intense, bluesy rock music onstage. Unfortunately, he did encounter some technical difficulties, causing the vocals to be repeatedly crushed out and a few bouts of unpleasant feedback. Although he started strong with “Nobody Move” and “Penny,” the crowd needed some motivation to dance– El Khatib worked tirelessly to get them to groove. He continued to deliver his marvelous noise with a charming sense of recklessness, clearly wearing his own dancing shoes. Wrapping things up with perfectly with “In My Veins” and “Loved One,” he successfully worked the crowd into a frenzy, reminding them why they were cheering for him in the first place.
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in All the Right PlacesTrouble Will Find Me hearkens back to High Violet, The National’s 2010 album, where perpetually brooding frontman Matt Berninger tells us in his distinctive rumbling baritone, “Sorrow found me when I was young.” And from The National’s extensive discography, it’s easy to understand the band’s long, unraveling history and the various troubles that have always dogged their steps, from their self-titled debut in 2001 (think “29 Years”) to the depressive paranoia of High Violet’s “Afraid of Everyone.” On Trouble, the band’s sixth studio album, the quintet dives deeper into a dense morass of meditative worrying and subdued gloom, and it’s just as wonderfully somber as anyone could wish.
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Showy surf rock combo Man or Astro-man? makes their dust-clearing return from an over 10-year furlough with DEFCON 5…4…3…2…1. In case you’re not hip to the band’s Atomic Age aesthetic—or their riotous, space-schlock stage presence—if the album’s clamped-down title happens to volley a salvo of early-NASA and Cold War images through your head, consider yourself clued in.
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It only makes sense that a band called Pure X would produce dreamy rock-noise-pop music. After a hellish year of physical injuries, long breakups and long-distance communication amongst band members, the three-piece from Austin display a smarter, crisper sound in their full-length sophomore album, Crawling Up The Stairs. They’ve dropped most (but not all) of the fuzz and reverb from their lo-fi debut album, and added more keys, synth, and overall diversity of sound to the second.
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