Journal
- Friday,February 13,2009
Dan Auerbach will be the musical guest on tonight's Late Night with Conan O'Brien. Tune in to catch Dan perform a song off his solo debut album, Keep It Hid. The show airs on NBC starting at 12:35 AM ET. The Associated Press finds Keep It Hid "every bit as brainy, engaging and powerful as" Dan's work with The Black Keys and also sees him "stepping out, stretching a bit" on the new album. It's "full of tasty sounds," says the AP, and "shows an understanding of what really makes rock roll."
Journal Topics: ReviewsTelevisionThursday,February 12,2009Joshua Redman's recently released double-trio album, Compass, finds the saxophonist "doing his best work yet," says the San Jose Mercury News. The album exhibits "a mood that ranges from ghostly to goosebump exuberant." Redman and "some of the best players of his generation" come together for interplay that is at once "intuitive, rambunctious, brilliant." The Vancouver Sun exclaims: "In or out of the groove, Redman and company perform magnificently."
Journal Topics: ReviewsWednesday,February 11,2009Rokia Traoré returns to New York City for a performance of songs from her latest release, Tchamantché, at Le Poisson Rouge in Greenwich Village. The Chicago Tribune calls this week's performance at Chicago's Old Town School of Music "riveting," one that showed the many facets of the "fascinatingly complex singer ... who embraces but also stretches centuries-old traditions." Throughout, "the incredible Traoré was in command of stage, song and crowd alike."
Wednesday,February 11,2009Dan Auerbach's Keep It Hid, earns an 85 from Paste, which says that Dan "explores the crossroads of early-‘70s rock and swampy ballads" on the album, while placing "more emphasis on melody and spacious production, bolstering his familiar barn-burning blues with a sense of exploration and comfort." The review concludes: "He’s a gifted songwriter, and his experience behind the microphone lends a melodic anchor to his guitar riffs, which blister and burn but rarely muddle their hooks in waves of amplified skuzz." The Times Herald-Record gives an A grade to this "ethereal, raw, visceral and wondrous" new record, "one of the great hidden emotion albums."
Journal Topics: ReviewsTuesday,February 10,2009Dan Auerbach's new Nonesuch release, Keep It Hid, scores a 9 out of 10 from Pop Matters. Citing influences from Motown to bluegrass, the review explains: "Auerbach never seems to be straining himself or merely appropriating other, signature sounds just for the sake of doing so. The music he has so obviously, and voraciously, absorbed makes him who he is, pure and simple ... It is not unlike the best Black Keys material, with all the obvious and not-so-obvious influences on the surface, unfolding into something startlingly original."
Journal Topics: ReviewsMonday,February 9,2009Dan Auerbach's solo debut, Keep It Hid, is out tomorrow. To mark the occasion, Nonesuch has launched a new Nonesuch Radio station titled "First Listen," where you can hear all the tracks from the album shuffled and streaming through release date. Dan's hometown paper, the Akron Beacon Journal, says that following "the revelation" that was The Black Keys' Attack & Release, Keep It Hid shows "other sides of Auerbach's abilities, such as how he can smooth out his primal, bluesy wail and still imbue his songs with emotion and passion, and can trade blunt force for pastoral melodies without losing the music's power."
Journal Topics: Album ReleaseReviewsRadioFriday,February 6,2009Rokia Traoré's two-week US tour with music from her latest Nonesuch release, Tchamantché, continues tonight at the Cedar Cultural Center in Minneapolis. That city's Star Tribune describes Traoré's work as "fearless, sophisticated, genre-bending music" and says her "gorgeous vocals ... express the nuances of intimacy and emotion with the refinement of a calligrapher." The Washington Post describes Rokia's voice as "dramatic and entrancing" but concludes, "The album's real allure is its blend of traditional and contemporary elements ..."
Wednesday,February 4,2009Rokia Traoré's recently released album Tchamantché is lauded as the Malian singer/songwriter's "best and most daring work" in a review for NPR's All Things Considered by Banning Eyre. "Traoré's meld of African and rock aesthetics is understated and as comfortable as it is cool," says Eyre. "The world's less-developed societies have produced many singers who seek to balance musical style and cultural perspective, and to address the larger world. Few manage it with the grace and style of Rokia Traoré."
Monday,February 2,2009John Adams led the Juilliard Opera Center in a concert performance of his 1991opera The Death of Klinghoffer on Saturday night, the culmination of Juilliard's FOCUS! 2009 festival. The distance of a new generation of performers "allowed this searing, mystical and ambitious work to come through without the doctrinaire baggage that has attached to it over the years," writes the New York Times's Anthony Tommasini. "What came through here, for me, was that this is one of Mr. Adams’s most intricate, entrancing and impressive scores. With these sympathetic young performers Mr. Adams was able to present it the way he envisioned it, or so it seemed as he took bows during the long ovation."
Journal Topics: ReviewsMonday,February 2,2009The Punch Brothers' US tour is winding through the South this week, having stopped at the Alys Robinson Stephens Performing Arts Center in Birmingham on Saturday. The Birmingham News gives the performance four stars, calling Chris Thile "extremely gifted, both as an instrumentalist and a composer," describing the band's music as "a distinctly modern sound that can be dramatic or lighthearted, solemn or joyful, rollicking or dissonant," and praising its "stellar musicianship. Thile and his bandmates can play just about anything and ace it."
Friday,January 30,2009Gomidas Songs, Isabel Bayrakdarian's 2008 Nonesuch debut and a Grammy nominee for Best Classical Vocal Performance, rates a perfect five stars in a review in The Scotsman, which states that this collection of songs by Armenian "composer of genius" Gomidas Vardabet "is a series of his songs with classical instrumental arrangements, sung with bewitching power by the Armenian-Canadian soprano Isabel Bayrakdarian. The accompaniment—by an ensemble led by Serouj Kradjian—is perfectly apt."
Journal Topics: ReviewsMonday,January 26,2009Enjoy This Post?
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