If most of Mark Deutrom’s new LP — The Blue Bird, kicking off 2019 Friday via Seasons of Mist — is any indication, the titular bird is a blue of the moody variety. Deutrom, guitarist-turned-bassist-turned-guitarist, Texan, ex-Melvin, has always packed his solo outings with lots of texture, context and ambiance. Sequencing, in particular, always has…
Review: Expires – “No New Futures”
Last year’s Fake Sigils was an engaging slice of glassy post-rock but Pittsburgher Mike Layton’s latest outing as Expires — titled No New Futures, and out Tuesday — has a new target altogether: the acoustic guitar. The unamplified approach does wonders for the six-stringer, lending his melancholy figures and descents shades both of David Grubbs…
Review: Night Vapor – “1,000 Miles of Mud”
“Dirtminer,” and its inherent sense of grime and mire and dischord, is the template. The opening song on Night Vapor’s 1,000 Miles of Mud — out last week via Corpse Flower and the much-anticipated follow-up to the band’s 2015’s S/T full-length — starts with frontman Albert Hall’s guttural utterances, disorienting fits of aggravation that fall somewhere between a…
Justin Vellucci’s Top Ten Records I Reviewed This Year — 2018 Edition
Well, here it is, Mr. December, yet another year, yet another year-ending list. And what more can be said? We want to be free. We want to be free to do what we want to do. We want to be free to ride. We want to be free to ride our machines without being hassled…
Review: Greg Dulli – “Have Yourself A Merry, Little Christmas”
In case you’ve been under a rock for the past 30 years, this just in: Greg Dulli’s a keeper, if he’d just allow us to keep him. The Afghan Whigs/Twilight Singers/Gutter Twins soul-rock leading man does it again today in the unconventional covers category, releasing on the Web a moody and decidedly NOT merry “Have…
Review: Sarah Longfield – “Disparity”
In terms of pure technique, Sarah Longfield’s a hell of a seven- and eight-string guitarist. Her new LP, Disparity, buttresses that thesis and then some. But can she write a song? Well, sorta. The new record, out Nov. 30 on Seasons of Mist, features nine songs that coalesce between glassy textures and rapid-tapping rock/metal shreddage….
Review: Tenchio – “Bedroom Chaos of The Inner Noodle”
Manuel Tenchio, who often just goes by the nom-de-guerre Tenchio, is a Uruguayan teenage guitar whiz who plays a kind of mutant math-thrash with reckless abandon. And if his second self-released record — Bedroom Chaos of The Inner Noodle, out recently on Bandcamp – is any indication, he’s either keeping heavily over-caffeinated or battling hefty…
Review: Calexico – “The Black Light: 20th Anniversary Edition”
I don’t know if I’m old but this didn’t seem that long ago. And only old people say that. It was 1999, maybe 2000, apparently. The venue was Maxwell’s, an infamous Hoboken, N.J. haunt with a decent bar (stiff pours) and a small, sound-proofed black room in the back for bands to make a clatter….
Review: Christian Frederickson – “Islands of Light”
There’s this piece of ephemera from the days of the Rachel’s ensemble that sticks to the attic of my mind like so much setting rubber cement – let’s call them the scrolls. Far from biblical or Talmudic or scriptural (in a sense of religiosity, at least), they were large sheets of paper on which members…
Review: Daughters – “You Won’t Get What You Want”
Daughters, never a band to play it understated, returns as a beast both transformed and reborn in the Rhode Island quartet’s first release since a pseudo “break-up” around 2009/2010 – You Won’t Get What You Want, out last week via Ipecac. It’s not immediately a satiating bit of consumption but it certainly grows inside you like…