brian

Artist: Kate Miller-Heidke

Album: Nightflight

Kate Miller-Heidke entered my life with her second album, Curiouser, one of my two favorite albums of 2010. Witty and tuneful, danceable and good-natured, sung both prettily and expressively by a woman unafraid to make brief, surprising use of her opera training, it was for me the greatest album of mainstream chart-pop since … well, ever. The Beatles’ best albums were mainstream only because the mainstream ran to catch up with them; Curiouser […]

Artist: District 97

Album: Trouble with Machines

District 97 are a Chicago band of four varyingly dorky-looking male rock musicians, all quite skilled; a not-at-all-dorky-looking woman named Leslie Hunt who joined the band after being a top-10 finalist on American Idol; and a cellist, Katinka Kleijn, talented enough to do solos for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. That lineup concept is why I tried them out in the first place. Say what you like about American Idol (in my […]