Grace Potter & The Nocturnals – Self Titled
Grace Potter means business. She lets you know from the get go with the first “UH!” on her band’s new self titled album, Grace Potter & The Nocturnals. This isn’t some poppy, Adult Alternative record; it’s a gritty, passionate affair with swagger, soul and plenty of classic rock influences.
The opening track, “Paris” kicks things off with a heavy guitar riff and the sleaziest drums this side of Don Henley’s The Long Run days. Singing about getting what she wants, Potter proves that she’s a woman with strength and conviction and knows how to work it. Grace Potter & The Nocturnals is full of songs that have a deep groove and a bit of an edge to them, such as “Oasis” and “Medicine,” which feature the kind of exemplary guitar work you’d expect to hear from the Allman Brothers on any given night. This may come from the Nocturnals’ years of touring, or it could be the new chemistry in the band. For this new album The Nocturnals include lead guitarist Scott Tournet and drummer Matt Burr joined by newer members bassist Catherine Popper and rhythm guitarist Benny Yurco; Potter covers the piano and organ. Read the full review
Ratatat – LP4
Past outings from Brooklyn duo Ratatat have been marked by bright lines, big blocks of color, and a sort of inoffensive coolness. It was electronic music delivered by cock-rocking guitarists, but with most of the gristly bits polished away: Think arena-electro for grocery-store aisles. But LP4 is refreshingly strange, the kind of album that’s fine to zonk out to, but even finer to pick through with a big set of earphones. Read the full review
Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti – Before Today
We know from interviews that Ariel Pink grew up absorbing throwaway pop from the 70s and 80s, finding a way to make it all fit into his cracked worldview. Something overlooked about those songs, though, is that the people writing them were pros who knew something about intros, codas, and middle-eights, how a certain kind of chord change can cause the turnaround to the chorus to hit a little harder. Ariel Pink’s best songs are surprising, and there’s a real sense of musical delight on Before Today; the sections sound logical but never predictable, and there are wild bridges and short bits that emerge seemingly randomly but wind up taking the song somewhere unexpected. So “L’estat (Acc. to the Widow’s Maid)” goes from a rollicking organ-led opening section to a catchy call-and-response chorus hook the Monkees might have liked to a short double-time instrumental section to a jubilant coda, and all the while the stitches never show. Songs like “Little Wig” have so many interesting interlocking parts that they can almost feel proggy, despite their relative brevity and tight pop structures. Read the full review
The Cure – Disintegration (remastered / expanded)
For the huge number of fans who discovered The Cure through the pop hits off 1985’s Head on the Door and 1987’s Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, the release of the band’s eighth album, in May 1989, was something of a revelation: Disintegration found Robert Smith sliding back into the thematic darkness of the Pornography era, but with that record’s bleak, brittle sheen replaced by much-needed melody and musical depth.
The resulting album still stands as The Cure’s greatest achievement, a work that’s both filled with despair and heart-rending beauty — as if Smith, however fleetingly, finally struck the right balance between his twin musical personas. Now, 21 years later, Disintegration is the subject of a wildly anticipated three-disc retrospective that not only delivers a sonic upgrade to the original album, but offers before-and-after context via a disc’s worth of demos and outakes, and a full live airing of the record. Read the full review
