Guided By Voices / Isolation Drills / TVT To put it bluntly, Isolation Drills rocks harder than anything else in GBV's seemingly endless canon. If Do the Collapse was the group’s Candy-O, Isolation Drills is most certainly their Who’s Next. With Rob Schnapf at the production helm, the group has created an album filled not only with the timeless pop hooks you have come to expect but with the anthemic swagger that is the hallmark of many of the great rock recordings of the last 30 years...more» FEATURED ON THE BOOMBOX!
		Pan Sonic / Aaltopiiri / Mute Imagine you're in a fantastic, crumbling, futuristic building. It's made out of a strange alloy of glass and grime, and the architecture somehow manages to combine sleek, modern features like brilliant, towering windows with dark, chaotic nooks and crannies. Although the building may be crumbling in places, it's still very much alive, and as you move through it the sounds of its inhabitants create a strange, constantly evolving sonic landscape: a broken machine hums itself to sleep; someone vacuums in a gigantic corridor; an all-night rave winds down...more» FEATURED ON THE BOOMBOX!
		Santa Sprees / Keep Still / Dreamy I was a kid raised on Fangoria, and my idol was Tom Savini, the special effects maestro who had his intestines ripped out (on screen, that is) in Dawn of the Dead. One of the things that makes Santa Sprees so special to me is that they shared my same dream. Their song on 1999's Head in the Clouds compilation, "I Wish I'd Been An Extra in Dawn of the Dead", was not only cool and kooky but rang very true to me. Enter their first album, Keep Still, on which the Santa Sprees continue to amaze and impress...more» FEATURED ON THE BOOMBOX!
		Karen Ashbrook and Paul Oorts / Celtic Café / Maggie's Music When I hear the "Celtic" tag applied to music, my mind instantly jumps to images of sweaty dancers flying about a warmly lit pub to the sound of a raucous jig. With this preconception in mind, I was initially somewhat let down by Celtic Café. Instead of focusing on the whirling energy popularized by Michael Flatley and bastardized by the Pogues, Karen Ashbrook and Paul Oorts reveal the many subtle layers of the Celtic sound -- layers as intertwined as the intricate knotted patterns that characterize Celtic art...more»
		Cristina Branco / Post Scriptum / Harmonia Mundi Cristina Branco and her producer/guitarist, Custodio Castelo, are modern practitioners of the fado, a Portuguese folk music distinguished by its expression of passionate ennui. "Fado" translates as fate, but the emotion of the fado reaches well beyond the literal to encompass a yearning, palpable metaphysical ache. The 28-year-old Branco and her accompanists aren't constrained by the stylized conventions of Portugal's national music, incorporating elements of classical guitar, jazz and Latin rhythms into a rich, beautiful fantasia...more»
		The Embarrassment / Blister Pop / My Pal God Though never particularly famous themselves, The Embarrassment are part of an elite cadre of groups -- The Vaselines, Television Personalities, The Sonics, The Raincoats -- whose music proved to be profoundly influential to latter-day tastemakers. If you're unaware of the band's place in history, they may not sound particularly special to you...but then, the Beatles might not sound particularly striking to a listener raised on their stylistic descendants...more»
		Gorky's Zygotic Mynci / The Blue Trees / Beggars Banquet/Mantra If you can imagine being able to hear a pastoral poem, like Arnold's "Thyrsis" or anything by Galway Kinnell or Gary Snyder, you can handily hear The Blue Trees in your mind's ear. Only eight tracks long, this album has alternately been described as a CD and an EP, but the length is just right for a straight-through listen, unlike the group's longer Spanish Dance Troupe. Although somewhat similar to Troupe, this album is softer, has fewer lyrics and favors neo-prog folk-rock over catchier, harder stuff...more»
		Kleenex/Liliput / Self-Titled / Kill Rock Stars Mixing punk rock attitude with girlish charm, Kleenex (later known as Liliput) set out in 1978 to prove that music could indeed be more fun than not. Over their five year career, they succeeded brilliantly, setting the stage for the grrrl groups that would follow a decade later. These two CDs (containing the entire Kleenex/Liliput recorded œuvre) were originally released in the early '90s, but quickly went out of print, becoming virtually unattainable for anyone not wealthy enough to purchase them as collector's items...more»
		Various Artists / Lamento Borincano / Arhoolie Puerto Rican music has long wrestled between the opposing forces of European music and emerging Afro-Caribbean influences. What won, more often than not, was the "danza," or the "national" dance of Puerto Rico, as dictated by the upper classes. But all that changed in 1917 when American citizenship was granted to Puerto Ricans and a wave of immigrants flocked to the US, particularly New York, in pursuit of economic opportunities...more»
		The New Year / Newness Ends / Touch & Go You can't keep true musicians away from music for too long, and the Kadane brothers are at it again with a new moniker, The New Year. What was originally the sleepy, minimalist guitar of Bedhead has evolved into The New Year, with some very familiar characteristics. The brothers Kadane have continued their legacy with a new band that lets the gentle ambiance of carefully placed guitar notes sway you into a heavily sedated, self-contemplating rock mood...more»
		David Sylvian / Everything and Nothing / Virgin Everything and Nothing is much more than an obligatory greatest hits package -- which in Sylvian's case would be inappropriate anyway, as commercial radio in the US has ignored his sweeping brand of avante pop altogether. What we have here is a self-produced double album that eschews chronology in favor of mood. This is the mark of good production on every level, and gives the album an undeniable freshness, even if some of its earliest material is two decades old...more»
		David Thomas and Two Pale Boys / Surf's Up / Thirsty Ear Because the unspoken rules of pop songwriting are so rigid, and the components so well-defined, Thomas believes that any group of reasonably skilled musicians should be able to pull these things out of their collective ass with minimal advance notice. It might amount to circular logic -- "The song will go this way because this is the way songs go" -- but the more you think about it, the more appeal the idea has. It might be a process beyond the abilities of the average musician-on-the-street...more»