This past weekend I had the rare opportunity to witness a performance by the one and only Tom Waits. From the venue (the deliciously gaudy art-deco miasma known as the Ohio Theater) to the merchandise stand (CDs, a pamphlet containing Waits’s interview with himself, and T-Shirts made from “real oil-slick photographs taken by Tom […]

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This just popped into my inbox from the publicist of Tom Waits. Apparently it’s going to appear on tomwaits.com soon but it’s not there now and I want to get it out as fast as I can, so I’m reprinting it. If that’s an issue I’ll take it down if asked, but I […]

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Here’s one we didn’t see coming: The Raconteurs went into the studio early this month, took a week to record a new album, rushed it to press and quietly announced it a week before its release. It came out today, available everywhere - but due to the secrecy and speed of its release you […]

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Everyone has those albums that they can put on at any time and in any mood, and just enjoy them. I’ve certainly got a few - Hendrix’s Are You Experienced?, Weezer’s Blue album, the Cowboy Bebop soundtrack… the list goes on.

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It seems to me that everyone has a different favorite David Bowie album. Sure, we all love Ziggy - but the magic of Bowie seems to be that he is able to speak to each of us in our own language. This doesn’t always translate well to others - why my favorite Bowie […]

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You know who they are. Robert Plant, the former front man for golden-age icons Led Zeppelin, is a household name. Alison Krauss is perhaps slightly less known depending on the circles you move in, but she’s today’s darling of the bluegrass/folk music scene (I first encountered her through the O Brother Where Art Thou? soundtrack […]

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Rambling Introduction
We all remember music in late 2001/2002 - nu-metal was still being treated with inexplicable respect, Weezer had publicly announced that they would henceforth suck, Avril Lavigne had burst onto the scene with all her antiestablishmentarian Candian punk rawk girl charm. Yes, they were dark times - but then we saw that video […]

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The White Stripes finally released their latest effort, Icky Thump, on June 19. I held off for a while reviewing this because quite frankly I had no idea what I thought. Frequently this means that given enough listens the album will grow on me and I’ll end up liking it a lot.

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