Scottish hitmakers Mumford & Sons are back with another agreeable, hooky collection of stomping folk-rock. How does “Babel” stack up to “Sigh No More”?
Posts tagged "music"
Spin Cycle: The Avett Brothers, The Carpenter
In the realm of swaying, stomping, harmonic pop-folk, The Avett Brothers stand only in the shadow of Mumford & Sons, a recent success story that, perhaps not-coincidentally, the long-running North Carolina brother-band is starting to bear more than a passing resemblance to. Comparing Mumford’s lone album to the Avett’s discography previously yielded only superficial comparisons: po-faced, earnest lyricism; the tell-tale lilt of a banjo here and there; shouty, fractured harmonies. But where the Mumfords use their Appalachian sensibilities […]
Spin Cycle: Alanis Morissette, Havoc and Bright Lights
Alanis Morissette is back with “Havoc and Bright Lights”, her first release since 2008’s “So-Called Chaos”. Popblerd has the review!
The Viewfinder: Ben Folds Five, “Do It Anyway”
Ben Folds Five has released the first video from their new record, “The Sound of the Life of the Mind”, and “Do It Anyway” features Fraggles. FRAGGLES, PEOPLE.
Songs In The Key Of Life 5: “Feel It In The Air”
How do you know who has your best interests at heart? June (with the help of Beanie Sigel) explores this in the latest Songs In The Key Of Life column.
Spin Cycle: The Tallest Man On Earth, There’s No Leaving Now
Beset by not-entirely-off-base Dylan comparisons since his debut dropped, Swedish folkie Kristian Matsson (stage name: The Tallest Man On Earth) is operating under the small-ish genre umbrella of indie folk, a lovely little haven where performers live and die by the strength of their songs, where rugged baritones and rambling napkin poetry are the order of the day, where boredom is uncomfortably easy to attain if you’re not careful. Fortunately for Matsson, he’s got the goods – “the goods”, in […]
Spin Cycle: Motion City Soundtrack, Go
An early summer night in 2008. Boy scoops girl up in battered Grand Am. A tentative, innocent kiss. “Where to,” he asks? “Let’s just drive. I finished your mix!” She smiles, handing him a slim disc case. There are graphics, a tracklisting, liner notes. My kinda girl, he thinks to himself. He scans the tracklist: Counting Crows, Deborah Cox, Motion City Soundtrack, Evanescence. He slips the disc into the player, willing to forgive the Evanescence in lieu of the sheer […]
bLISTerd Presents: The 100 Best Albums of the Eighties (100-91)
It’s Lionel Richie! Guess what? He helps kick off our list of the 100 best albums of the Eighties. Click to find out who else made the list!
Spin Cycle: B.o.B’s “Strange Clouds”
Rapper, singer, and multi-instrumentalist B.o.B returns with “Strange Clouds”, the stormy follow-up to his hit-spawning “The Adventures of Bobby Ray”. Check out our review!
Diggin’ in the Crates: “Stoney and Meatloaf”
It’s accepted music lore that Meat Loaf ripped through popular music on the back of a silver black phantom bike like a bat out of hell with his solo debut, appropriately titled Bat Out Of Hell. It was a work of massive, lusty hubris, composed by master songwriter and closet freak Jim Steinman, and it married 1960s adolescent yearning to a Spector-esque wall of sound – complete with horns, resplendent grand pianos, wall-to-wall vocals, and charmingly pretentious spoken-word excerpts – […]
We Saw It! “Michael Jackson: The Immortal World Tour”
Even if you’re a die-hard Michael Jackson fan – the kind that’s owned five copies of Thriller to replace worn-out ones or collect the bonus material on every repackaging – it can sometimes be easy to forget, even if just for a second, what it means to recognize the artistry of Jackson as a composer, arranger, singer, dancer and all-around showman par excellence of the 20th century. Cirque du Soleil’s Michael Jackson: The Immortal World Tour , which played Newark, NJ’s Prudential Center on Saturday, was a reminder of […]
