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 […]
Music
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A blissful sound
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 […]
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Adieu, elevator shoe
Back in 1997, jazz saxophonist Frank Trompeter was fascinated by electronica and trip-hop and began wondering how those sounds would translate into live music. Along with drummer Ted Keylon, Trompeter began an experiment that became the band elevator shoe. After the addition of bassist Bruce Williams and guitarist Ocean Alexander in early 1998, the group […]
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Serenity then — and again
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 […]
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Host with the most
Seems as though everyone knew a beautiful dreamer when they were in high school who said, “I’m heading to California to make it in a rock & roll band.” At Pleasant Plains High, our traveling man was Bill Laymon, and he did go to the land of the do-re-mi — and guess what? He did make […]
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Bearing the Celtic-music cross
The Lash, a self-proclaimed Celtic Americana band from the Lansing, Mich., area, began as a simple St. Patrick’s Day escapade. According to Rob Kladja, the only original member still with the group, two separate local Lansing bands decided to launch impromptu Irish groups on St. Patrick’s Day in 1997. The two groups found other, joined […]
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At least Granny rocks
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 […]
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Ambassador from poetry land
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 […]
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Spreading a Backyard Tire Fire
When Ed Anderson disbanded his successful Chicago roots-rock outfit Brother Jed in 2000 after five years of hard work, he knew what he was doing and where he was going. He joined up with his best pal, drummer Tim Kramp, and together they became Backyard Tire Fire, beginning a march toward success and recognition. After […]
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A spoonful of sugar
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 […]
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Reporting on Kinsey
When I worked at Appletree Records, in the Chatham Square Center off Wabash Avenue, in the late ’80s, the Kinsey Report was a hot new band with a debut release on Alligator Records that was the talk of the town. They were stretching the limits of blues music with a rock attitude and a funky […]
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A slump so sublime
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 […]
