Sometimes all someone needs is a vacation to refocus and get the creative energy flowing. That’s certainly the case for Taken By Trees, which is the project of Swedish-born, L.A.-based singer Victoria Bergsman. The former lead singer of Swedish indie pop outfit the Concretes, Bergsman left the band in 2006 to focus on Taken By
What happens when a band hits its peak? In the case of Animal Collective, the answer is reverting back to the past. The most obvious indication of going back to the old days is the return of Deakin, the band’s keyboardist/percussionist/sample-maker/electronics whiz. As a quartet, the band agreed to move back to its hometown of
The debut album from Las Vegas based Imagine Dragons, Night Visions is refreshing. Each song welcomes the listeners to a bit of the unexpected while keeping an epic fullness of sound plus a bit of grit through the tracks. The first single, “It’s Time,” is the song that originally got me interested in the band.
In nine years, Matthew Dear has shown many incarnations, from DJ to producer to pop artist, but it wasn’t until his latest release that the co-founder of both Ghostly International and its offshoot Spectral Sound revealed the most important person of all: himself. The title Beams can have double meaning here, standing for either a
What’s up with British chanteuses and their affection and gifted talent for soulful love songs, anyways? Adele owes her global success to that broken love she once had while Amy Winehouse’s “Love is a Losing Game” is an ultimate love song curse. Then there’s instrumentalist crooner like Corinne Bailey Rae whose neo-soul love numbers have
A couple of years ago there was an album; really it was a collaboration that was supposed to be super-secret. It was a bootleg for a while, but that was most likely a huge marketing ploy to sell more records (I’m dubious of everything). That record was called Dark Night of the Soul, a collaboration
I’m not even going to bother going into the “supergroup” thing (oops) and instead recognize that Divine Fits is a well-balanced band comprised of dudes that have their own successful projects, and who combined the best aspects into something of its very own entity. Comprised of Britt Daniel from Spoon, Dan Boeckner of Wolf Parade
Nashville blues punkers Natural Child have already received many comparisons to Neil Young & Crazy Horse, The Stones, and The Stooges, and today they release their new 7-inch as further evidence to warrant all of that. The 7-inch, as well as a pack of rolling papers, is out on Jeffrey Drag Records, a musician-run label
Cari Rae and Jordy Asher’s music outfit, Blonds, gets compared to groups like Tennis and Cults. Why? Because they are a boy and a girl making pop music. These are not bad comparisons by any means, but Rae and Asher’s project is not a rip-off of the pioneers of cutesy indie pop. In fact, it’s
In 1997, after phenomenal freshman and sophomore albums, Oasis released Be Here Now. Even though many critics liked the album, some criticized the overproduced sound and bloated length. Oasis had tried to go from early Beatles to White Album Beatles overnight and while the album sold well it was still considered a disappointment. It sort