Release Date: April 13, 2018 Label: Sunday Best Recordings If you look closely at the cover of L.A. Salami’s 2018 album, The City of Bootmakers, you’ll notice that he’s leaning up against a wall of cultural signifiers. Bob Dylan, Nina Simone, Paul McCartney, Outkast, The White Stripes, Hunter S. Thompson, Kings of Leon, The Velvet … Continue reading Album Review: L.A. Salami – The City of Bootmakers
Album Review: Frightened Rabbit – The Midnight Organ Fight
Release Date: April 14, 2008 Label: Fat Cat Records This may well be the most difficult album review I’ve ever written. Not because the music is hard to appraise (I’ll tell you straightaway, The Midnight Organ Fight is a brilliant album), but because of how life can sometimes imitate art. When I started writing this, Scott … Continue reading Album Review: Frightened Rabbit – The Midnight Organ Fight
Album Review: Big Thief – Capacity
Release Date: June 9, 2017 Label: Saddle Creek In my last album review, I spent several paragraphs explaining how the details of a person's personal life could be extraneous to analyzing an album. Especially when the details are those sorts of universal emotional travails we all have experienced in one way or another. That kind … Continue reading Album Review: Big Thief – Capacity
Album Review: Keaton Henson – Kindly Now
Release Date: September 16, 2016 Label: Play It Again Sam Most reviews accompanying Keaton Henson's recent album, Kindly Now, draw attention to his chronic anxiety and reclusive persona. And by my referencing those references, I've now done the same in my review. Damn it. That wasn't my intention. Including those details in press releases and … Continue reading Album Review: Keaton Henson – Kindly Now
Album Review: Ólafur Arnalds – Island Songs
Release Date: August 12, 2016 Label: Mercury Classics I enjoyed the process of struggling with how to describe an album so much in my last review, that I decided to tackle another album a bit beyond my grasp. Here we have an instrumental album by Ólafur Arnalds called Island Songs. I'm sure that Dennis, my … Continue reading Album Review: Ólafur Arnalds – Island Songs
Album Review: Yorkston/Thorne/Khan – Neuk Wight Dehli All-Stars
Release Date: April 7, 2017 Label: Domino Recording Company My friend Dennis is a composer. He has a theory that the most interesting innovations in music happen in those spaces where genres and traditions smash together to recombine in new, unexpected ways. There was a period when music was brimming with innovation. New genres and … Continue reading Album Review: Yorkston/Thorne/Khan – Neuk Wight Dehli All-Stars
Album Review: Aldous Harding – Party
Release: May 19, 2017 Label: 4AD There is a place for quiet music in this world, for introspection. When I was living in downtown Fort Collins, I used to put on my headphones on warm summer evenings and go for a walk around the neighborhood. There I'd drift through the twilight in the alleys and … Continue reading Album Review: Aldous Harding – Party
Album Review: Skyway Man – Seen Comin’ from a Mighty Eye
Release Date: February 24, 2017 Label: yk Records For those of you who are unfamiliar, Fort Collins is a mid-sized college town about an hour north of the Denver/Boulder nexus. Growing up here, the music scene was dominated by bluegrass and jam bands. That's not to say there weren't pockets of other music, just that … Continue reading Album Review: Skyway Man – Seen Comin’ from a Mighty Eye
Album Review: Meilyr Jones – 2013
Release Date: February 26, 2016 Label: Moshi Moshi Records Every year, when the year-end best-of lists come out, I make a good-faith effort to give each of the represented albums a good listen. Sometimes I agree with critics' assessments, many times I don't. Most often, the lists converge around some inexplicable trend sweeping the indie … Continue reading Album Review: Meilyr Jones – 2013
Album Review: Dirty Projectors – Dirty Projectors
Release Date: February 21, 2017 Label: Domino [Note: This album review is part of a paired set of reviews meant to be considered together: see Amber Coffman's City of No Reply for the corresponding review.] I had a plan for this review. It was going to be about how my friend John hates the Dirty … Continue reading Album Review: Dirty Projectors – Dirty Projectors