Artist: Jack o’ the Clock
Album: All My Friends
Two years ago, I chose Jack o’ the Clock’s How are We Doing, and Who Will Tell Us? as my #1 album of 2011. In retrospect I’d put it at #2 — behind They Might Be Giants’s Join Us — but it’s an extraordinary record, blending pretty folk/Americana and nicely-sung storytelling with avant-garde influences and surrealism, so I’ll tell you about five of its highlights before I continue.
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Artist: Kanye West
Album: Yeezus
Reviewing Kanye West’s Yeezus is a double challenge for me. On the one hand, Yeezus was chosen by music critics as a whole, in the giant Village Voice Pazz & Jop Poll, as the #1 best album of 2013 (so my rating it as #33, though intended as a compliment, opens the question “Why are you dissing it?”). On the other, I’m pretty sure a majority of *my* readers don’t like Kanye […]
Artist: the Scaramanga Six
Album: Phantom Head
Phantom Head, by the British band Scaramanga Six (who currently are in fact a sextet), is an energetic album of sinister-for-the-fun-of-it bar-band rock. It reminds me of the leaner-poppier side of ’70s Blue Oyster Cult (the Career of Evil/ Harvester of Eyes/ Debbie Denise side), or of Thin Lizzy’s twin-guitar rock if they’d sung from the perspectives of dangerous psychopaths-in-training. Or of the Who if they’d been Judas Priest fans, […]