Someday my ideal record player will arrive at my doorstep, I know it. It will cost under $150, have built-in speakers (I mean I don’t need to broadcast across the Grand Canyon, for Christ’s nuts) and won’t break right after I drop $90 at our local record store on vinyl. Until then, all I have […]
10 Parano – “Come Right through – Original Mix” This Parano DJ certainly keeps a pretty low profile but does stake his claim to a pretty groovin’ brand of jungle-house, full of some pretty off-kilter sounds and a voluminous mass of hypnotic techno bulbous enough to let the drugs kick in. .. 9 The Koreatown […]
10 Led Zeppelin – “How Many More Times” With this tune that closes Led Zeppelin’s self-titled debut, part of the essence of this list is poised to value a riff’s overall function, like how spiritedly it’s embraced by the song itself. In this case, Page repeats this thing on pretty much the whole bumpy ride, […]
10 Gilad Hekselman – “Magic Chord” feat. Eric Harland Everything about the production on Far Star, the new album by Brooklyn jazz guitarist Gilad Hekselman, breathes fiery life into the listener’s ears. The drums, though played softly and heavily on the cymbals, are clear and robustly loud, with Hekselman’s chosen instrument of guitar within jazz […]
100 Grateful Dead – “Man Smart, Woman Smarter” (Download Series Vol. 9: Live at Civic Arena, Pittsburgh, PA / April 2, 1989) Wikipedia has “Man Smart (Woman Smarter)” slotted as a “calypso song… variously credited as being composed by Norman Span… D.L. Miller, F. Kuhn, and Charles Harris,” with Span being who “first recorded the […]
10 Juga-Naut – “Dropping Hints” A jaunty, jazzy but tense beat help this UK rapper sustain an overall vibe on “Dropping Hints” with the ambience of work music and the verbose energy to soundtrack your solitary nights or train rides. .. 9 La Milagrosa – “Asesinos” Amongst what seems to be a litany of Hispanic […]
In sitting down and getting to writing about the albums for my year-end list, I almost always feel a certain element of anxiety. This snag was in the works big time for 2021, the year we’re emerging from the doldrums and entropy of the COVID nightmare, and are finally supposed to be regrowing all our […]
25 “We Can Be Together” (Volunteers) 1969’s Volunteers is a significant album in the Jefferson Airplane history for, primarily, being their most politically subversive statement, at least explicitly, and also, marking the last band project that guitarist/singer Marty Balin and drummer Spencer Dryden would partake in. Perhaps appropriately, it’s a confusing hodgepodge of stylistic array […]