René Spencer Saller

Various Artists Imaginational Anthem: A Guitar Anthology (Near Mint) O glorious guitar, the sound of wood made radiant, the sound of metal made vegetal, a vibrating synthesis of opposing elements housed in a vaguely female-shaped form! Unlike the elitist piano, which costs a bundle to buy and maintain and can’t be lugged around at a […]

Confession time: Until about a month ago, I hadn’t been listening to much Kate Bush, and I’m not sure why. True, she hadn’t put out a record in 12 years, and I tend to listen mostly to new releases, a hazard of the record-reviewing trade. But a quick inventory of my vinyl racks proves that […]

After a hiatus spanning more than two decades, guitarist James “Blood” Ulmer’s Odyssey trio has returned with a new album, a 55-minute tour de force that neatly encapsulates the myriad musical directions that its iconoclastic leader has pursued over the past half-century. Don’t let the CD’s title fool you: An amalgam of free jazz, country-blues, […]

Cast King Saw Mill Man (Locust Media) If fate had dealt Cast King another hand, he might be as famous as the late Johnny Cash. Like his more celebrated contemporary, King toured extensively in the late ’40s and early ’50s and even cut some tracks with Sam Phillips at the legendary Sun Studios. But when […]

Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan Ramblin’ Man (V2) Who says long-distance relationships never work? Despite being separated by some 8,000 miles, Isobel Campbell, of Glasgow, and Mark Lanegan, of Los Angeles, have brought us Ramblin’ Man, a four-song collaboration that wouldn’t have been possible without the Internet (tsk, tsk — and you thought it was all […]

Dear Bill O’Reilly: As a godless liberal, I have no reason to like you. Your unctuous smirk and smarmy patter got on my nerves when you were a lowly late-night infotainer; since you’ve resurrected yourself as a right-wing demagogue, you’ve gone from annoying to insufferable. But Christmas time’s a-comin’, after all, and in the spirit […]

Mi and L’au Mi and L’au (Young God Records) You don’t know Mi and L’au, but you know a couple like them: beautiful, blissfully in love, and, well, sometimes a bit of a drag. They’re so into each other, so deeply connected and complete in themselves, that being around them feels vaguely creepy, as if […]

here are comebacks, and then there are comebacks. The gap between British folksinger Vashti Bunyan’s debut, Just Another Diamond Day, and its follow-up, Lookaftering, lasted 35 years. By music-biz standards, that’s an eternity, at least enough time for one pop tart to be born (or, more accurately, spawned in the lab), to enact three or four […]

The Fiery Furnaces Rehearsing My Choir (Rough Trade) If you thought Blueberry Boat was a buttload of bull, steer clear of Rehearsing My Choir, a wildly pretentious tour de force that’s sure to alienate all but the most ardent Fiery Furnaces fans. Rehearsing, the duo’s fourth full-length, is a collaboration between the Friedberger siblings and […]

Almost no one reads poetry anymore, which means that you probably haven’t read Actual Air, one of the very few poetry collections written by a working singer/songwriter that’s worth a damn (sorry, Jewel). Praised by former poet laureate Billy Collins and The New Yorker, the book proves that David Berman isn’t just another singer/songwriter with delusions […]

Unless we’re talking about, oh, I don’t know, Ken Mehlman’s sex life, there are no guilty pleasures. If pleasures could induce guilt, confessing them wouldn’t be the hipster’s favorite parlor game, the subject of so many self-aggrandizing/self-effacing conversations in which Totally Unique Rockdudes strive to outdo one another by professing/confessing their not-so-secret love for Hall […]

Love Kraft, the Super Furry Animals’ seventh studio album, begins with a splash — literally. It’s the sound of guitarist Huw “Bunf” Bunford diving into a swimming pool, and, given the fact that there are no accidents in the SFA cosmology, the effect would seem to serve some kind of symbolic function, to augur a baptism […]