Artist: dEUS

Album: Keep You Close

dEUS, on Keep You Close, build smoky, minor-key rock grooves and lock into them, building and shaping each over the course of about five minutes. Their singer Tom Barman, the American among these giants of the Belgian scene, used to remind me of Kermit’s nephew Robin the Frog and/or Emmet Otter and/or Gobo Fraggle. His vocal tone still remains from those comparisons, but Barman’s shed his boyishness (though less so […]

Artist: Dirty Projectors

Album: Swing Lo Magellan

One of the most basic music-theory concepts — I don’t know the fancy ones — is the “interval”: the gap between one note and the next. A “first” is the same note repeated. A “third” is two letters apart in terms of the note name: for example, a C followed by an E. The third might be a “major third” C to E, “minor third” C to E-flat, “augmented third” […]