News, Interviews, Reviews & More
Denver musician and songwriter Joshua Novak may not be a household name beyond his Rocky Mountain home, but Novak has been a revered talent in the Colorado music community for more than a decade. After releasing The Five Day Romance, his lauded five-song debut EP, in 2004, Novak’s fans endured a five-year chasm until the [...]
The story of Sixto Rodriguez and the Academy-Award-nominated documentary Searching for Sugar Man, a film about the mysterious, triumphant narrative of Rodriguez’s life and music, are genuine wonders for the ages. A street-walking musical poet of inner city Detroit crafted two magnificent albums steeped in social issues and heart in 1970 and 1971, but the [...]
Brad Oberhofer and I have history. I interviewed the principal songwriter and front man behind Oberhofer last February, catching him right before his first major North American tour and the release of the much-anticipated full-length record, Time Capsules II (An Interview with Brad Oberhofer: Talented, Earnest, and Straight from the Dentist). Since then I’ve been an avid fan; [...]
Truth For News is the debut album from Rain Over St. Ambrose, a great rock and roll band from Yarmouth, Nova Scotia who are unsung beyond much of their own backyard. I’ve had the record in heavy rotation for several weeks and recently awarded it a four-star rating in my review. It’s an 11-song, straight-ahead [...]
Quiet Company are a wondrous, hardworking band from Austin, Texas who pack deep personal truths into magnificent arrangements with unshakable choruses, and they are riding a wave of praise thanks to the challenging revelations all over their latest, grandest record, We Are All Where We Belong. The album’s material could easily have befallen polemic suffocation [...]
Music has its charms and its mysteries, but it also holds keys that open doors to understanding hidden meanings. Many musicians believe in the mystical qualities of music. Some musicians have made some very serious studies of the spiritual effects of music, from the incessant and sexually pounding Afro-Caribbean rhythms of Voodoo and Santeria to [...]
TST: I often try to stay away from acronyms, especially because the independent music community has been so rife with TLA (three letter acronym) abusers for the past 10 years. Man, that sounded so hipster of me. Anyway, for the purposes of efficiency – and I assume you don’t mind – I’ll be referring to [...]
Omaha trio Icky Blossoms are a band with a commanding sense of what they hope to achieve: to get bodies to move and to keep you interested in the songs on repeated plays. To say they are restless group wouldn’t give Derek Presnall, Sarah Bohling, and Nik Fackler enough credit. Filmmaking and visual arts are [...]
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