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Glass Animals – ZabaHarvest-out June 103 / 5Contributed by Bera Dunau (@BeraDunau) ZABA, the debut album from alternative rock band Glass Animals, is a relentlessly smooth piece of work. Indeed, it is the perfect accompaniment for a peaceful a.m. drive on a deserted freeway, where the only company can be found in the streetlights passing overhead. Unfortunately, this very smoothness is also the album’s greatest weakness, as it is so consistent in tone that the tracks have a tendency to blur together. This makes it a bit of a one-note effort, although the one thing that ZABA does, it does well. Glass Animals’ sound isRead More →

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Stand ’em up, knock it down. Canterbury’s sweetest groove since the Tales. (L to R: Raven Bush, Liam Magill, Fred Rother, Joel Magill. Copyright Andy Cotterill) Brighton Music Hall, Brighton, MA. Sat. 6-7-14, 8pm. $12 adv. 18 and over with ID. This fierce foursome of Brits come to nigh-Boston this weekend. Why must we let you know this? Because they take half their name from a Kinks album, and if you don’t know our position on the Kinks, then you must be new to the blog. Point for them. They’ve also got a new psychedelic album out with all kinds of time signatures that justRead More →

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Meshell N’Degeocello – Comet, Come to MeNaive-out now2.5 / 5 There are a few things that give away to us how to score an album on this blog. Number one is ultimately compulsion – do we have to play an album again and again? Typhoon’s White Lighter suffered from this (and still does). Memory is the next thing, that is, do we keep playing the music in our head again and again (like Delta Spirit’s I Think I Found It)? And thirdly, if we’re familiar with the artist, where does it rate in their discography? To start from reverse, Me’shell NdegeOcello’s latest studio album, Comet,Read More →

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Syd Arthur – Sound MirrorHarvest–out now4 / 5 Psychedelic foursome Syd Arthur know good music. Taking their moniker from ex-Pink Floyder Barrett and mashing it with one of our favorite albums by the Kinks, the Canterbury-based rockers’ sophomore full-length is replete with poly-chromatic instrumentation (including piano!), soaring choruses, and shifting time signatures. It is educated, conscious of bands not only before their time (Pink Floyd, The Who, perhaps the Doors) but also of contemporaries (Portugal. The Man). It is vibrant: pulsating with life, entertaining, fresh. It is, in short, a delight. When the piano hammers out the opening lick to “Hometown Blues,” we definitely feelRead More →