Artist: Half Past Four
Album: Good Things
The logic of belatedly reviving my best-of-2013 countdown on Thanksgiving weekend — after having left it too often neglected in a 2014 that’s been dominated for me by my mother’s fatal cancer, which has left me busier, less-helped, and sadder than usual — is that I personally tend to write music reviews in the spirit of giving thanks, a spirit I’d like to get back into.
As an extra incentive, given […]
Artist: Ukandanz
Album: Yetchalal
The band name Ukandanz can be pronounced as “You can danz” (“dance”), thus I pronounce it that way. They’re a French band (sax, bass, guitar, drums) that plays loud, highly energetic Ethiopian-style pop music sung by immigrant Asnake Guebreyes, so I have no idea if I’m pronouncing it correctly, or what the name might in fact mean. But I *can* dance, and the music on Yetchalal makes me want to, and now this […]
Artist: Reign of Kindo
Album: Play with Fire
The songs I embed with a review are always, I figure, better than nothing, but they range from “desperately-grabbed only YouTube evidence this artist exists” to “an illustration of one of the several approaches the artist uses” to “just right”. In the case of Reign of Kindo’s Play with Fire, I’ve got the latter: not only is the Hero, the Saint, the Tyrant, and the Terrorist my favorite song […]