The Warlocks, 'Heavy Deavy Skull Lover' (Tee Pee)
No sorcery is strong enough to raise these songs from the dead.
By Stacey Anderson 01.18.08 4:17 AM
Despite the disarmingly stupid album title (sounds like a necrophile's eHarmony page), the Warlocks are more funereal than ever. The Los Angeles quartet (halved from the lineup of 2005's Surgery) load their pinwheeling psychedelic rock with twice the distorted strings and percussion, but the outcome is sluggishly unrealized.
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R.E.M., 'R.E.M. Live' (Warner Bros.)
Buck, Mills, Stipe, and others lead an old Irish sing-along.
By Stacey Anderson 01.18.08 4:17 AM
Michael Stipe hates false advertising -- he opens R.E.M.'s first concert album with the assertion "I don't wanna be Iggy Pop" ("I Took Your Name"). And Live attests that their rock has always been about composure, not raw power. Its 22 tracks are steady and regal, so pitch-perfect that they're often indistinguishable from the studio counterparts.
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Patrick Watson, 'Close to Paradise' (Secret City)
Hallelujah, it's Montreal indie rock's answer to Jeff Buckley.
By Stacey Anderson 01.18.08 4:17 AM
Patrick Watson is a man, a band, and a circus waiting to explode. The dramatic singer/keyboardist and the quartet that bears his name have hit a kinetic stride on their second album, a balletic sweep of cabaret pop, spacey rock, and effusive classical piano that thinly veils an anxious pathos (cued by dissonant brass and threatening strings).
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Jens Lekman
Scandinavian softie turns life's little moments into pretty pop.
By Stacey Anderson 12.27.07 10:43 AM
It takes a peculiar person to enjoy being interrogated by U.S. immigration agents. Someone, in fact, like Jens Lekman. "I said I was a musician, then one agent told the other one, 'Check him out on Wikipedia,'" the 26-year-old Swede recounts gleefully at a Manhattan café. "So they started reading about me, and they got really into it.
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Broken Social Scene Presents Kevin Drew, 'Spirit If…' (Arts & Crafts)
Toronto collective's main man disappears down a side road.
By Stacey Anderson 10.19.07 3:00 AM
Canada's Broken Social Scene excel at drawing memorable hooks out of sprawling, eccentric arrangements. But when cofounder Kevin Drew sublets the name for this solo debut, he caves in to a self-indulgence the collective would never allow, even in its shaggiest moments.
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Iron and Wine, 'The Shepherd's Dog' (Sub Pop)
Florida folk rocker's songs, beard grow fuller.
By Stacey Anderson 10.05.07 3:00 AM
If, as he sings on "Lovesong of the Buzzard," "No one is the savior they would like to be," then Sam Beam has found peace in his trespasses.
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