René Spencer Saller

Untitled Document They may hail from balmy Miami, but the Postmarks certainly have a yen for the changing seasons. Their debut full-length boasts such climatologically perverse song titles as “Summers Never Seem to Last,” “Looks Like Rain,” and “Winter Spring Summer Fall” — concepts that are as far removed from most Floridians’ experience as thermal […]

Untitled Document The Book of Exodus isn’t one of God’s finer moments. From the moment he first appears to Moses in the form of a burning bush, it’s obvious that Mr. I-Am-That-I-Am has a thing for cheap theatrics. When his staff-into-serpent party trick falls flat, he makes with the real razzle-dazzle. Rivers turn to blood. […]

Untitled Document When it comes to death, most sane people would prefer to put it off for as long as possible. As Dylan Thomas famously advised, “Do not go gentle into that good night/Old age should burn and rave at close of day/Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” Guy Blakeslee, whose nom de […]

Untitled Document Maybe you’re thinking that the world doesn’t need another Daniel Johnston tribute album, and maybe you’re right. Regardless of where you stand on the highly vexed outsider-art question (are we laughing with ’em or at ’em?), it’s hard to argue that Johnston, who’s been the quintessential cult hero’s cult hero for more than […]

Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers, and Bastards, Tom Waits’ three-disc, 54-track tour de force, is more than a cleverly titled collection of outtakes, rarities, and oddball covers. It’s more than a grab bag of crap that didn’t make it into the official canon, more than a curated tour through the swollen archives of a three-decade career. Whereas […]

In the booklet accompanying Swan Lake’s debut is the following epigraph: “Beast Moans is a testament to friendship, eternal and otherwise.” The sentiment is sweet but more than a little scary. Sure, friends can inspire one another to new heights of creativity, but they can also goad one another to new depths of idiocy. Friends […]

Hot on the heels of Ballad of the Broken Seas, Isobel Campbell’s album of duets with Mark Lanegan, Milkwhite Sheets finds the Glaswegian cellist/chanteuse all by her lonesome again, with mixed results. Anchored by Lanegan’s saturnine growl, Campbell’s little-girl coo seemed uncharacteristically womanly; the dichotomy served both singers well, evoking the archetypal pairings of Nancy […]

Death, unlike taxes, is the great equalizer. From the mewling preemie in the neonate ward to former President Gerald Ford, from the lowly fruit fly to the august giant tortoise, from the pope to the Dalai Lama to the highest-ranking officiant in the Church of Satan, we can all look forward to that long dirt […]

Untitled Document If you like your power pop sweet and shiny and more than a little bit silly, the Trolleyvox is the band for you. The Philadelphia-based quartet, whose ranks have swelled and contracted over the group’s decade-long career, delivers hooky, anthemic, mildly eccentric guitar rock dosed with girl-group vocals, nonsensical lyrics, and oddball instrumentation […]

Amy Annelle, the singer, songwriter, and sole permanent member of the Places, traffics in narcotic dream-folk cut with aleatoric noise. Sometimes alone, sometimes accompanied by a revolving cast of musicians, she makes music both sordid and soothing, deadpan parables and sour lullabies inspired by the haunted places that she passes through between tour stops, forgotten […]

On its second full-length, Akron/Family delivers more of the transcendentalist free folk that’s made the band famous, or at least famous among all of the right people. Ex-Swan Michael Gira loved these hirsute young Brooklynites so much that he not only signed them to his label but also hired them as his backing band, the […]

For most of his career, Kid Congo Powers (né Brian Tristan) was a sideman, performing with some of the most influential bands of the past two decades. He began playing guitar in 1979, when a charismatic weirdo named Jeffrey Lee Pierce taught him a few tricks and inducted him into the Gun Club. By the […]