Tindersticks: The Something Rain
What is there to be said about Tindersticks? There really shouldn’t be too much because their discography speaks for itself. The Something Rain, is their tenth studio release, and that is not to be included with the four soundtracks they have done, or the dozens of singles and all this is even outside their ten or so solo and sides projects.
Consistency is at the crux of Tindersticks success. Their music is characterized by a resounding smooth jazz atmosphere, completed with a baritone lounge delivery and the ultimate vision that a song need not fit within the three minute radio format.
The Something Rain begins with a spoken word parable “Chocolate,” that makes no qualms about whether or not you’re listening. Rather than shout to get your attention, vocalist Stuart Staple speaks softly, evenly, drawing you into the track on the strength of a dripping guitar melody and the metronome like quality of piano rhythm.
From this lazy river opening the album expands outward as if urging the audience to indulge in the abundance of time and space. There is no rush, no urgency, rather the comforting knowledge this is a rainy Sunday afternoon. There’s all the time in the world, but that doesn’t mean the group is going to bore you. Far from it, over their twenty year career Tindersticks has cut their chops, paid their dues and knows exactly what they’re doing.
Mind the haunting melody drifting in and out through “A Night so Still,” my personal favorite track, and drift over the horn work on “Medicine.” The Something Rain has a lot to offer, so let the politicians conspire, and the traffic outside maddening rush, and just sink into comforting glow that is The Something Rain.
Rating: 7.0/10
MP3: Tindersticks “A Night So Still”
Buy: iTunes or Insound! Vinyl

Various Artists: DJ-KiCKS Exclusives
In 1995, !K7 Records released the first volume of DJ-KiCKS. Compiled by British EDM producer CJ Bolland, it was an auspicious begin for what has become one of the most revered mix album series. In 2006, !K7 released DJ-Kicks: The Exclusives to celebrate the 25th release in the series. The album compiled 14 of the exclusive tracks from their previous works. Stand out artists on the compilation included DJ Cam, Thievery Corporation, Tiga, and Annie among others. The compilation received tepid reaction from critics and fans alike for its non-dance focus and what some Amazon user reviews called “cheese” factor. Five years later, DJ-KiCKS attempts to correct these flaws with the release of their second compilation of exclusive tracks.
Having only five years worth of DJ mixes to work with, some might think the second volume of DJ-KiCKS Exclusives starts off with a disadvantage. But the advantage of having five years worth of material to work with is that all the tracks are still fairly current. The oldest track to appear on the album is Four Tet‘s “Pockets.” Luckily, Four Tet is so far ahead of his time that the track in no way sounds aged.
The most aged sounding tracks come from electrofunk duo Chromeo in the form of “I Can’t Tell You Why” which sounds like a lost Hall and Oates jam. The track embodies the cheese factor that Amazon users were complaining about. The cheese factor continues with Holden‘s uninspired Kraftwerk rip off “Triangle Folds” and Scuba‘s Jock Jams outtake “M.A.R.S.”
But in between the less than cheesy tracks are some worthwhile listens, most notably Henrik Schwarz‘s “Imagination Limitation” which straddles the line between dance pop and something you find on one of those “chill” CDs at the spa. Larger name artists like Hot Chip and The Juan Maclean deliver fairly substantial tracks as well.
But even with the addition of those tracks, the only inference that can be drawn from listening to DJ-KiCKS exclusives is that artists do not go all out for their contributions. The joy in DJ-KiCKS is the same joy you had making a mixtape for your friends when you were a kid. It is a chance to boldly proclaim “this is who I am” in musical form. The exclusive track has become somewhat of a necessity but rarely is it a chance for an artist to drop a great track; it is generally a b-side quality track at best and I think that shows on DJ-KiCKS exclusives.
Rating: 4.7/10
MP3: Henrik Schwarz “Imagination Limitation”
Buy: iTunes or Insound!

Simon Spire: No Solid Ground EP
We are going to play a quick game of word association. When I say “wussy piano rock,” what do you think of? Elton John, you say? That’s cute. Now, think of someone incapable of writing with the fervor of “The Bitch Is Back.” Coldplay? That’s a good one. Now, think of something without the ability to write sweeping epics like “Viva La Vida” or “Paradise.” Five for Fighting? There we go. That is more along the lines I was thinking, that really cheesy adult alternative contemporary. Can you name another band like that? Keane? Sure. Augustana? Yup. Well, now add Simon Spire to that litany.
Spire releases his latest EP, No Solid Ground advanced of his sophomore album, Four-Letter Words which will be released later this year. The EP shows off Spire’s more or less generic songwriting. It kicks off with “Liberate Your Love,” which sounds like Weird Al covering Jack’s Mannequin.
“No Solid Ground” is the slow jam of the EP with its minimalistic R&B beat and hotel lounge piano work. Spire attempts his most emotive vocals on the track but his voice is not classically emotional. Instead it has a quirky quality that would make it perfect for tongue-in-cheek lyrics. Unfortunately, Spire shows no sense of irony or wit at any point in time on the EP. Without a sense of insouciance, No Solid Ground feels like nothing more than Muzak.
Rating: 5.7/10
MP3: Simon Spire “Knocking On an Open Door”
Buy:

The Jealous Sound: A Gentle Reminder
Jealous Sound’s first full length album in nine years, A Gentle Reminder, rings with a sense of triumph, from a band many thought they’d never hear from again. LA band, the Jealous Sound first appeared on the indie rock radar with 2003’s Kill Them With Kindness. In the intervening years the band faced burnout, label issues and only managed to release the underwhelming Got Friends EP. With A Gentle Reminder, their sound has undergone an evolution, becoming a more mature band that has learned from its mistakes.
Lead vocalist and guitarist Blair Shehnan, had dropped out of the music scene, spending time in Las Vegas and Florida, before finding his way back to the band. Shehnan has a vocal mastery of the loud/quiet dynamic. He manages to combine a passive vulnerability with the power of a pop anthem.
“Your Eyes Were Shining” starts small, with drums and bass. The momentum steadily builds through the chorus. Here Shehnan sing’s of coming to terms with life’s disappointments, and trying to be honest in love. The title track is another demonstration of a rock solid rhythm section driving the song, which is the perfect accompaniment to Shehnan’s laconic vocal delivery.
With A Gentle Reminder, The Jealous Sound manages to do what few musical acts can do these days, deliver a solid well crafted album. They do what they do well, but there isn’t much variety, leaving the listener to wonder whether the Jealous Sound still has more to show us.
Rating: 7.5/10
MP3: The Jealous Sound “Your Eyes Were Shining”
Buy: iTunes or Insound!

Viper Creek Club: Hot Lights
Nevermind the romantics of Valentine’s Day, let’s get laid! And hold up a second, I got the perfect soundtrack, Hot Lights, the new EP by the dance duo of Mat Wisner and Brandon Jensen, more popularly known as Viper Creek Club. Hot Lights, urges you over the course of six synth-laden up tempo tracks to get up offa that thing, and dance until you feel better. A very simple formula is put to use: Combine relentless electric dance hall drum tracks, a start stop start song progression, and hedonistic lyrics delivered impatiently in something of a rocker’s growl over sufficiently attention holding, pulsing track decoration. Hot Lights plays out just long enough to start your hips gyrating without over-doing itself or fatiguing the audience through repetition.
With tracks like “Because I Know” and “Your Body,” the EP is fine by its own merits, say to put your partner in the mood on a rainy afternoon, but to really appreciate any of the tracks to their full extent I think a packed and sweaty E-driven club is more appropriate. The nature of the music itself demands no questions or self reflection, rather seems an incessant ‘go go go’ to spite any misgivings about lining yourself out on a mystery drug, random bathroom sex with a stranger met on the dance-floor, or whether or not the after-after party is a good idea. And this I can fully appreciate.
It seems the only weight to bring one back down into the realm of reality appears on “In the Living Room,” which is appropriately the last track. It’s a wind down really, the BPM’s are rolled back and a little more attention is paid to atmosphere as accusations of alcoholism and over-doing it surface like wrinkles around the eyes of any veteran clubber.
Viper Creek Club does an excellent job of delivering short, tight, and catchy party anthems in the spirit of LMFAO. And while I doubt we’ll be listening to Hot Lights ten years on, it definitely accomplishes the objective of living in the moment right now.
Rating: 6.5/10
MP3: Viper Creek Club “I Want You To”
Buy: iTunes

Heartless Bastards: Arrow
Heartless Bastards‘ fourth album, Arrow, finds singer Erika Wennerstrom and her band seeking shelter. It’s a safety that is never guaranteed. There is little hope for escape from hard times, but, when survival is the imperative, staying on the move is better than waiting around in resignation to pending threat. If the Bastards’ last album, The Mountain, was an introspective rumination on Wennerstrom’s love and how she came to lose it, Arrow is her attempt to quit bellyaching, roll up her sleeves, and do the work required to get to the next place, keeping the faith that it will be an improvement upon the present circumstance. Littered with allusions to being far from home and finding home, Arrow is a literal, physical album that seeks to draw a map to concrete outcomes. And on that map, the whiskey stains and cigarette burns acquired in its making are part of the geography, as landmarks, signposts, and obstacles to be navigated. Though the destination is unclear, the journey’s value is in making the effort. “We all race for our own reasons,” she sings on the opening track, “Marathon”, “and sometimes, in the middle, we all meet.”
The garage-rock designation that has been applied to Heartless Bastards on previous albums is less applicable on Arrow. On this outing, Heartless Bastards might be more appropriately likened to the roots rock of Steve Earle or Drive-By Truckers, with whom the Bastards toured in 2011. Fortified by the addition of a second guitarist, Mark Nathan, the Bastards’ once-sparse sound, while still conventional, is fuller, bringing a more sweeping, cinematic intimacy and always providing a solid vehicle for Wennerstrom’s doleful hoot. Think wide and distant shots of a road-worn Chevy pickup, motoring across a hardscrabble horizon.
“All of my days I spend wandering out, wandering towards the sun,” as Wennerstrom sings on “The Arrow Kills the Beast”. It’s a line that sums up the pioneering spirit of the album. There comes a time when dealing in known quantities, however safe and comfortable, becomes unbearable. Hitting the road and riding things out to the bitter end will either bring doom or salvation. But death by the elements, or triumph over them, is a better death, or greater triumph, than a life of fear, drowning in the hypothetical.
Rating: 8.5/10
MP3: Heartless Bastards “Marathon”
Buy: iTunes or Insound! Vinyl

Barry Adamson: I Will Set You Free
It took me sometime to realize just how I feel about this album. I really didn’t know what to expect from someone who’s previously played in two very different bands: the jerky punk band, Magazine, as well as the noisey pre-industrial post punk group Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds. So you can imagine my surprise when I heard lounge music coming from my computer speakers. At first, most listeners will probably just pan this as a bad album, and I wouldn’t blame you. There are a lot of things in this album that people will justifiably not enjoy; some of those things will remain un-enjoyable regardless of how many repeated listens you give this album. But fans of Barry Adamson‘s solo work will most likely find this to be fairly enjoyable, emphasis on the fairly.
Something that I found that grew on me was the album’s instrumentals; throughout the album Barry uses many different instruments, almost every song has a horn section, guitar, others feature keyboards and if I’m not mistaken one or two have electronic drums (see “Turnaround” and “Trigger City Blues”). This is not unlike Barry’s other albums, also similar to his previous work Barry does diverge into different styles. As seen in the punky opener “Get Your Mind Right” and the almost electronic intro to “Looking to Love Somebody” (which goes terribly wrong 26 seconds in- listen to the sample and watch the clock). But he doesn’t change the sound up as much or as well as he’s done in the past, most of this album stays in lounge mode, which isn’t the best type of music for Barry’s voice.
Think of a less flamboyant Dr. Frank-N-Furter combined with Tom Jones, but worse than what you’re thinking right now. Some critics seem to really enjoy his voice on his last album Back to the Cat. This reviewer didn’t. I think a lot of what helped garnered that album’s critical acclaim was its well written instrumentals and lyrics. This album unfortunately is lacking in both those departments, not completely throughout, but enough for there to be a significant difference in quality. Also some of the instrumentals sound cheesy and could almost be played at Macy’s without middle-aged mom’s noticing. Ultimately it does not follow up Back to the Cat.
However the instrumentals really accentuated some of the songs such as “The Power of Suggestion” and “Somebody to Love”. Another plus is there isn’t as much singing on these songs and when he does sing it’s not too unpleasant. And it is interesting to hear Barry change things up like on the punkier “Destination” which has a cool dissonant guitar riff (so does “Trigger City Blues”) and okay lyrics. It’s a nice break from lounge music. The lyrics aren’t too bad on this one, but on songs like “Somebody to Love” and “Turnaround” the lyrics at some points sound like they took little thought and focus on love mostly, which is appropriate for it’s valentines day release.
The conclusion I reached after listening to more of Barry’s solo albums is that this album doesn’t stand up to his other releases like Moss Side Story or Back to the Cat, but it really isn’t all that bad. If you’re interested in hearing an album that I guarantee is a change up from what you listen to on a daily basis, this is it. Hey you might even find yourself enjoying it, because ultimately it’s not that bad. Some of it is pretty great actually, but those parts are few and far apart.
Rating: 5.0/10
MP3: Barry Adamson “Looking to Love Somebody”
Buy: iTunes or Insound! Vinyl

Joe Cool: Cooley Hi
Joe Cool was born Terrance Donell Brown in Chicago, Illinois. When he was 15 he moved to Louisiana and started producing and recording music, for himself and others. His biography on his website paints him as an entrepreneurial rising star. With nearly 2,000 followers on twitter, he definitely has a growing fan base. His personal website is primitive and confusing in its layout (understandable for an underground artist), but to the best of my knowledge this is his third mixtape. While I write this, Joe Cool’s first mixtape, Late Departure, has only 68 downloads on Datpiff; Cooley Hi, his new album has more than 27,000. That is a direct testament to his persistence and hard work. If for nothing else, I respect his tenacity and devotion to the craft of his art.
Right away, my impressions of Cooley Hi were favorable. There is a cool intro track where Joe Cool opens with the introspective: “All these conversations in my mind/like am I really living or am I just wasting time?” The next track dives into what we can expect for the majority of the album: incredibly cool tracks. They are laid back yet have a degree of excitement to them; Joe Cool raps considerably well. His lyrics are vibrant and clearly understood. I beg the comparison of a Kid Cudi/Wiz Khalifa hybrid. Though he talks about women, money, and drugs, we also find him talking about life, the difficulties of being an underground rapper, and the hardships of growing up in the South Side of Chicago and Louisiana, as discussed on the track “Louisiana Sky”.
Joe Cool does most of his own production work: of the fifteen tracks on the mixtape, only four are produced by other artists. The production work is surprisingly good for an underground artist. The track “MK Ultra” opens with a hilarious sound byte many people will recognize from a cult classic movie. It then jumps into a bass bumping, swag filled song that I could see being prominent as a single. It’s a fun track, but the best tracks on this album are where Joe Cool sounds like he is enjoying himself the most, and appears most comfortable rapping. These would be his more laid-back songs. “I Wanna Sell Drugs” speaks with purity when Cool raps “All I got is a dream, and a laptop that’s full of beats/and I did them shits myself, I trade them for something to eat”
There is something incredibly likeable about Joe Cools style, whether it is his sincerity or his smooth flow. He embodies his name, which is admirable in a rap game full of sellouts and wanna-bes. Simple Joe, Cool Joe: I hear within this mixtape the stepping stones of greatness. With a little more work and finesse of his talent, Joe Cool could go on to do incredible things. He will continue to grow and learn as he is exposed to, and appreciated by, more and more people. Every person I introduced this album to had favorable things to say about it. Cooley Hi is honest and cool.
Rating: 8.5/10
MP3: Joe Cool “I Wanna Sell Drugs”
Download: DatPiff

Bill Ortiz: Winter In America
“We often celebrate ignorance in our society, so I wanted to celebrate consciousness”- Bill Ortiz
This sense of societal consciousness is the prevailing characteristic of Winter In America, the newest EP from hip-hop trumpet player Bill Ortiz. From the very first track, Ortiz makes his view of the current conditions in America clear with his fresh cover of Gil Scott Heron’s 1974 track, “Winter In America.” Here, Ortiz sets the tone of the EP with the song’s easy flow, smooth production style, multi-layered groove, and free trumpet solos interspersed with lyrics about awareness and change. It is the amalgam of these musical characteristics that prevents the EP from becoming too bogged-down by the serious content of its language.
Overall, this EP can appeal to two different groups of hip-hop fans: the political and the groove-oriented. The tribute to Gil Scott Heron and the inclusion of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s words on “I Still Believe” call for some education on the part of the listener, but the EP is not inaccessible to those who are not learned in African-American literature and history. Ortiz brings his experience as Carlos Santana’s trumpet player to break up the lyrics of each song with trumpet lines that are, at once, subtle and disruptive, natural and produced, based in theory and based in soul.
The biggest critique I have of this EP is that there are really only three different songs on it. The radio edit of “Winter In America” and the “Montgomery Bus Remix” of “I Still Believe” are unnecessary, and could have been left out to make way for new tracks. That being said, the songs are so good in the first place that I would take a second listen.
Rating: 8.0/10
Song: Bill Ortiz “Winter In America”
Buy: iTunes

San Cisco: Awkward
San Cisco‘s very accurately titled EP, Awkward, is all about crossed signals, misread cues, and failure to take a hint. Heavy on the choruses and heavy on the drums, the Australian four piece delivers infectious pop in the vein of Blur and Vampire Weekend. Though a bit heavy on the non-sensical scat singing, the boy-girl vocal attack of Jordi Davieson and drummer Scarlett Stevens is ultimately more endearing than irritating, especially on the title track. Listen in moderation, though, because the catchiness of the four original songs on offer borders on ear worm territory. They tend to cling to the brainpan and, while fun, they aren’t lyrically substantive enough that anyone would want them there for very long. Rounding things out is a blistering cover of Arctic Monkeys‘ “505″ that, in its stark minimalism, offers more dramatic highs and lows than the original. Awkward is fun for all of its fifteen minute run time. Enjoy it, but look too deeply into it and run the risk of feeling awkward, yourself.
Rating: 7.5/10
MP3: San Cisco “Awkward”
Buy: iTunes