music – Page 17 – Vol. 1 Brooklyn

“Strange Songs That Invite You In Gently”: An Interview With Shana Cleveland

June 8, 2015 No Comments

The last time I talked with Shana Cleveland, her band La Luz was in the midst of releasing a host of EPs. Since then, they’ve released one full-length, It’s Alive, on Hardly Art, with a followup due out later this year. She’s also released her debut solo album: Shana Cleveland and the Sandcastles’ Oh Man, Cover the Ground, on Suicide Squeeze. While it shares a haunting quality with her work in La Luz, Oh Man, Cover the Ground also features […]

Featured, Interviews, music

Reubens Accomplice on Album Reissues, Acoustic Shows, and Side Projects

May 18, 2015 No Comments

Arizona’s Reubens Accomplice have been making layered, catchy, sometimes pastoral indie rock for a while now. Earlier this year, their album The Bull, The Balloon, and The Family was given the tenth-anniversary deluxe-reissue treatment. Listening to it now, one can hear their penchant for memorable hooks, subtle earworms on the choruses, and a textured sound that’s aged quite nicely. I checked in with singer/guitarists Jeff Bufano and Chris Corak to learn more about the process of putting the reissue together, […]

Books, music

When Alice Bag Went to Nicaragua

May 11, 2015 No Comments

It has always bothered me a bit that the Los Angeles punk scene of the late 1970s and early 80s is viewed by some as being sort of behind New York and London in terms of importance and influence, when the fact is that it’s really the opposite: Los Angeles was just as interesting, if not more so, than those other places. For every person I see reading Please Kill Me (which is a crucial book, no doubt), I really […]

music

Will Oldham, Craft Beer, and Bars’ Backyards

April 27, 2015 No Comments

On Saturday evening, I staked out a spot at the Williamsburg bar Spuyten Duyvil, ordered a pint of beer, and waited for Will Oldham to show up. The occasion was a release event for an EP and a particular brew that served as a collaboration between Oldham, the band Watter, and Baltimore’s Stillwater Artisanal, a craft brewery who’ve done a handful of collaborations with musicians, including Lower Dens. The band, Bonnie Stillwatter, was doing a lightning round of appearances, stopping […]

Featured, Interviews, music

Pop Investigations, Specificity, and Misheard Lyrics: An Interview With Fred Thomas

April 23, 2015 No Comments

The songs heard on All Are Saved, the new album from Fred Thomas, cover a wide stylistic range, from stark narratives to ecstatic arrangements. To anyone familiar with Thomas’s body of work, which includes albums released under his own name as well as with the groups Saturday Looks Good to Me and City Center, this is probably not going to be much of a shock. Throughout, memorable riffs and choruses weave around haunting memories and observations of geographical spaces. It’s […]

Featured, Interviews, music

“A Road Trip Album for Driving Around Fantasia”: Talking Miller and Brautigan With Doldrums

March 31, 2015 No Comments

Montreal’s Doldrums, the musical project of Airick Woodhead, isn’t the easiest entity to categorize. There’s a stripped-down aesthetic at work, but a number of the songs on their latest album The Air Conditioned Nightmare are magnificently catchy. That the album shares a title with a Henry Miller book is also an indication of Woodhead’s fondness for books. Literary allusions can be found throughout the new album, and I checked in with Woodhead via email to learn more about the process […]

music

Some Notes on Xetas’s “The Redeemer”

March 18, 2015 No Comments

Austin’s Xetas first came onto my radar via Andrew Earles’s review of a recent 7″ on Still Single. “I suppose there’s a dominant essence of this that could have been heard in 1995 out of the San Diego scene,” he notes, and that’s a comparison that definitely got my attention. That’s how I came to pick up their new album The Redeemer, which has been on heavy rotation on my turntable and via iTunes for the past week or so.

Featured, Interviews, music

Pop, Opera, and “Finding Sonic Transcendence”: An Interview With GABI

March 16, 2015 No Comments

GABI, the group led by composer Gabrielle Herbst, fits neatly into the increasingly blurred space between the rock club and the new music venue. GABI’s debut Sympathy (due out on April 7th on Software) is an unpredictable album, at times disconcerting in its rearrangement of familiar elements, at times washing over the listener in a more melodic fashion. It hits on both a cerebral and a visceral level, and I spoke with Herbst about balancing her pop and compositional impulses, […]