Roots Magic is a quartet of Italian musicians: Alberto Popolla on clarinet and bass clarinet, Errico De Fabritiis on alto and baritone saxophone, Gianfranco Tedeschi on bass, and Fabrizio Spera on drums. Their second release on Clean Feed records continues the band’s deep engagement with African-American delta blues and experimental jazz. The late, great Lester…
No one is ever going to call singer/songwriter Bill Mallonee an under-achiever. His latest release, a 10 song full-length effort, Forest Full of Wolves is his 78th album by his own count. Mallonee spent the 1990s fronting Vigilantes of Love, shuffling from one label to the next. They drove a van coast-to-coast playing every alternative…
The Thread That Keeps Us – the ninth album from Calexico – is yet another artful collection of stories. They’re told with the band’s eclectic musicality and a mature songwriting sensibility that shows up primarily in strong, impressive melodies. Rooted in the long collaboration of singer/multi-instrumentalist Joey Burns and drummer John Convertino, and favoring a…
Sydney based alt-country singer-songwriter Imogen Clark has been busy lately, revealing plans to release her new album Collide on 27 April 2018, dropping her catchy new single and video “Your Anything At All” and listing so many tour dates it’s impossible not to get out and see her. Collide is Clark’s second album and was produced by Australian music legend Mark Lizotte…
One of my favorite musical scenes in film is that long opening sequence at the beginning of the movie Once, where you can hear Glen Hansard playing guitar and singing while the camera tracks along the dark streets of Dublin before settling on the singer/songwriter busking in front of a storefront. Knowing that Hansard’s career…
Listening to the latest from Icelandic chanteuse Björk, can feel like stepping through the curtain to enter an audio/visual piece at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC. At first it can feel jarring, disorienting as the music pulses with what may seem at times like several different pieces of electronic music at once, and…
B.B. King once told an interviewer questioning how long he could continue to record and tour, that “the Blues do not retire.” The King, who died at 89 may have actually kept performing a few years after “The Thrill (Was) Gone,” but at 80 he still had a lot on the ball. And, at 78…
One of the challenges when your band’s the second highest grossing touring band of the year, is “Getting Out of Your Own Way.” Of course, that’s a problem most working bands would love to have, but Irish rockers U2 have been such a big deal for so long, that nearly everyone on the planet has…
Most of the time you don’t know when something will be your last time. When I took my son to see Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers last May, I didn’t know we’d never get another chance to see that band. There have been rare exceptions – like Warren Zevon, David Bowie, and Leonard Cohen. They all…
St. Vincent’s eponymous 4th solo album, released in 2014, was easily her most accessible, while also delivering some pretty amazing songs packaged with electro-pop polish, and marked by her unique guitar playing. And it paid off big, landing her on dozens of “best of year” lists and winning that year’s Grammy for Best Alternative Album,…
