Calexico – Edge of the SunAnti / City Slang-out April 144 / 5 It’s a return to everything we love about Calexico: swirling sand dunes, flamenco beats, mariachi swagger. The Tuscon, AZ sextet to their ninth studio album in a nearly twenty-year lifespan. How many things last twenty years? A good car? A stable marriage? If a band is in part a marriage of musicians, then we’d have assumed Calexico’s marriage to have grown quite stale and predictable by now. And on Edge of the Sun, band co-founders Joey Burns (vocals, guitar) and John Convertino (percussion) show that Calexico’s spark is alive and well. ToRead More →

Sufjan Stevens – Carrie & LowellAsthmatic Kitty Records-out now4.5 / 5 Stylistically, Sufjan Stevens’ seventh studio full-length falls somewhere between Michigan and Illinois: it takes Michigan‘s somber mood, a quieter, more introverted desperation than that album’s more externalized search. It takes not Illinois’ lush orchestration, but its polish, its perfectionism and completion. Add acoustic guitar, piano, and Stevens’ soft vocals, and the result is an achingly beautiful album about life and loss, death and ghosts. Yes, we gave high marks to his previous “Age of Adz,” but quite frankly, if we could take that back and give them all here, we would do that inRead More →

Joe Pug – WindfallLightning Rod Records-out now2.5 / 5 We’ve been keeping our (non-blue) eyes on the Austin-based Mr. Pug for quite some time now. Since his first, brilliant EP, Nation of Heat, we’ve been sucked into his hard-scrabble, Dylanesque folk-slinging. Now, upon the Windfall of his third full-length album, we still see snippets of that brilliance: a glimmer of insightful storytelling, the scintillation of those bared-down melodies. But on the whole, we must say this, that Windfall comes crestfallen, that it is much too complacent, that it’s the infamous Sophomore Slump that 2012’s The Great Despiser could have been (but certainly was not). Unfortunately,Read More →

Dutch Uncles – O ShudderMemphis Industries-out Feb 24 (UK Feb 10)4 / 5 We are fans of this Manchester, UK five-some. Their fourth full-length brings them back into the e-sound that we prefer: lush popchestration, dense layering, a wide spread of variety. It’s a “pop electronic’d” that champions musicianship (and oboe, and other woodwinds), the kind of a ride that’s built on a solid four (we should say five) wheels. It’s got vocals, lyrics, instrumentation; it’s got joy, it’s got memory. Dutch Uncles is one of those bands that slips off the radar, but mostly because they haven’t come off the island and hopped aRead More →