Archive for the What We’re Into – Recent Interest Category

This week, The Stones play the blues, Kate Bush commemorates an incredible stage show, Childish Gambino rocks, Dylan finally releases the REAL Royal Albert Hall show, John Legend goes dark, Isabelle Faust moves us with her passion for Martinu, and Ennio Morricone looks back. Read on… ROLLING STONES, Blue & Lonesome (CD/LP) Their first studio […]

Gillian Welch’s 1996 debut, Revival, is one of the era’s most influential albums, its retro stylings and bleak evocations of the dust bowl era marking the transition from alt-country to Americana. Welch’s revivalism was no Carter Family copyism; here was a startlingly good songwriter who could put you in the place of a barroom girl or mountain moonshiner with a few piercing images. David Rawlings’s impeccable picking and harmonies sealed the deal. This 20th-anniversary set fills a bootlegger’s jug with 21 outtakes and demos of Orphan Girl, Annabelle and the rest.

It’s been eight years since Metallica’s last studio album. But that’s small change next to their long haul to this two-disc resurrection: via the jagged apocalypse of 1988’s …And Justice for All and the focused brawn of 1991’s Metallica. The mostly epic-length tracks – almost entirely written by drummer Lars Ulrich and singer-guitarist James Hetfield – are melodically assured furies of serial riffing and tempo shocks. “Hardwired,” “Atlas, Rise!” and “Now That We’re Dead” are relentless whirls of tribal chug and hyper-thrash, braking hard at the title chorus lines.

Guitarist and former wunderkind Daniel Bachman, at 26, can no longer be considered “precocious.” On even his earliest recordings, released under the moniker Sacred Harp, Bachman’s guitar prowess and compositional voice were staggeringly mature. There was something refreshingly novel about a guitarist not old enough to vote possessing such clarity of vision. But novelty wears off, and even the most big-eared benefactors are likely to become fickle and disinterested over time; the fans who do happen to stick around may begin to hold you to impossibly higher standards – after all, you’re not a kid anymore. And so it is a pleasure to hear Bachman, with his new self-titled album, so confidently answer the bell with an album that serves as both riposte and reckoning. If you’re not with Bachman now, the album seems to declare, you never were.

A companion EP arriving just three months after their critically acclaimed studio album, ‘Anyway You Love, We Know How You Feel,’ the five track collection, includes “New Cannonball Rag,” “Shadow Cosmos” and “Roan County Banjo,” all of which were recorded during the same Stinson Beach sessions that resulted in the prior full-length. With these songs already staples of The CRB’s live sets, it marks the first time the official studio recordings will be available.

An interesting bunch of stuff in our New Releases section this week. Datura 4 brings the heaviness, Brian Jonestown Massacre keeps it weird, Alejandro Escovedo returns with his first solo album in four years, and we’ve got extra compilation and Gene-centric jazz-and-classical goodness. Read on…. DATURA 4, Hairy Mountain (CD/LP) Rock n Roll fans, please […]

In this week’s New Releases, we reverently bow our heads and welcome the new album by the ageless Leonard Cohen, we celebrate the return of American Football (the band, not the sport), we dive into the demented hip-hop weirdness of Nx Worries, and we delight in a new Pretenders album produced by Dan Auerbach! Read on…

The throwback Southern rockers Blackberry Smoke kick off our New Releases this week, followed by a bluesy David Bromberg album, the swan song from experimental metal gurus Dillinger Escape Plan, a truly moving tribute to Italian opera by Jonas Kaufmann, a truly lovely downer from Conor Oberst and a star-studded tribute to the Night Tripper, […]