Originally hailing from the state of Iowa, Laura Sprengelmeyer has been a long-time staple of the Montreal indie rock scene, a scene that has brought the world-either for its benefit or utter detriment, you decide-The Arcade Fire. Unlike that band, the music Sprengelmeyer releases under her stage name Little Scream is far less bombastic. Although […]

Brad Oberhofer released a fantastic EP in 2009 and has continued to steadily gain critical attention. He will make his biggest splash yet with the release of Time Capsules II, his first full length effort which was produced by Steve Lillywhite who has worked with such acts as U2, The Rolling Stones, Morrissey, and others. The […]

DIRTY BEACHES - (2011) BADLANDS This is the album by Alex (aka Dirty Beaches) Hungtai Zhang, a Taiwanese living in Canada that offered in 2011 an artful mixture of hazy rockabilly and psychedelic lo-fi with a unique “distant-crushed” humid tropical flavor in a sense of a low-energy/drifting vibe of a day spent. In this DIY […]

We all have shadows and this is a band not shy of showing theirs as the name of the band suggests (NEW order, Joy DIVISION) but there is not carbon copy of their influence. Sure, additive synth keys brings those shadows from’78-’81 - 1st wave of post-punk. But the unique feature of the CD is […]

For all those hoping for a list, you’re at the wrong place. I’m not going to actually tell you what the best albums of the year are. For those that insist, the best album to come out this year was PJ Harvey’s Let England Shake. You are, certainly, free to disagree with that and say […]

I don’t have a prolonged review of anything right now. I have albums for review, but I’ve got very little interest in listening to them. They are these rather generic rock albums. While I’m sure they are competent, they aren’t really grabbing my attention in any meaningful way right now. Although from first synth strike […]

As this is Breast Cancer Awareness month, I would like to acknowledge Lhasa de Sela. Lhasa de Sela was an amazing and unique artist who died of breast cancer on January 1 of last year at the age of 37. Lhasa was a multi-language artist with her own philosophy. She used her poetic gifts in […]

ISAM is the culmination of a trilogy by Amon Tobin in the past decade and his take on the purest form of electronic: Concrete Music, the fundamental pillar of electronic music. Pierre Schaeffer, French radio engineer of the 1940s, created the first electronic music studio in Paris and began experimenting with what he called “musique […]

NB: Continuing the cavalcade of album reviews today, I post a new piece from a new contributor here at the blog, Steve Crowley. You may know who he is. You might not on the other hand. That being said, I’m sure that he can tell you who he is as soon as he gets blog […]

Warm Ghost is a duo hailing from the indie music hotbed that is Brooklyn, NY. Their music connects two very different worlds. The first is that of standard electronic pop like Au Revoir Simone, The Human League and Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. In the other world are innovative abstract electronic artists like Christian Fennesz, […]