AKA: Psychedelic Music • Umbrella of styles intended to replicate or enhance the altered state of consciousness brought on by the use of psychedelic drugs, originating in the 1960s. Here are the best albums of the genre for each year from 1965 to the present. 1965: Ballads of Contemporary Protest, Point of Views, and General Dissatisfaction by…
Air – La Femme D’Argent
Bruno Pernadas
Imagine wandering into a retrofuturistic lounge where the air is misty with martini dew. A big jazz band is the main attraction and their sound is foreign yet pleasing to the ear. Each song is a journey and when the trip is over, you see the world with new eyes. Bruno Pernadas is a Portuguese…
Top 10 Albums of 2020
This first year of a new decade will certainly go down as a memorable one. We’ve been cooped up and masked up and forced to turn inward. Music lovers were hard-pressed to see any of their favorite artists live. But thankfully, musicians kept cranking out great albums. Here are ten of the best from an…
Album of the Month – August 2020
Western Swing & Waltzes and Other Punchy Songs by Colter Wall There’s a lonesome hopefulness to this album, which sounds like it was recorded by a middle-aged man in the mid-20th century and not a 25-year-old in 2020. Colter Wall sings with real country soul, a deep twang that seems to have been shaped by…
Islandman | Karavan Sessions
Late summer night vibes
Album of the Month – July 2020
Lianne La Havas by Lianne La Havas “Lianne La Havas‘ previous LP, Blood, almost topped the album chart in the U.K. and was up for a Grammy in the U.S. The singer/songwriter was dissatisfied — not with its reception but with compromises that left her feeling that it wasn’t a pure expression of herself. To name…
Album of the Month – June 2020
Mordechai by Khruangbin Khruangbin’s third album is nothing groundbreaking but does exhibit a subtle evolution of their sound. This is late-night music that will make your mind slow down. The musical elements mesh well. The deep steadiness of the rhythm section, the serpentine guitar lines, the voices that seem to float like purple smoke. There’s…
Album of the Month – May 2020
Summerlong by Rose City Band Sounds like a float down a lazy river in the California desert … or the Grateful Dead if they abstained from noodling and traded in their acid for some mild bud. This album is the perfect soundtrack for the carefree daze of summer. Put it on in the background during…
Essential Blues
“I’m a bluesman moving through a blues-soaked America, a blues-soaked world, a planet where catastrophe and celebration – joy and pain sit side by side.” – Cornel West With a pandemic taking lives and a global recession taking livelihoods, now seems like as good a time as any to delve into the blues. Here are…