The career of Daniel Smith, leader and mastermind of Danielson, has a strange irony: his music promotes spiritual healing, oneness and love, but by and large, his audience has been attracted by its joyous perversity. Smith sings exclusively in a high, squeaky voice, and his twee, disorientingly ad-hoc compositions have the feel of a soundtrack to a puppet show or grade-school musical play - perhaps not entirely inappropriate, given Smith's famous on-stage appearances in a ten-foot homemade tre
Picking the best folk and Americana records of the year isn't nearly as hard as discarding those great records that just didn't feel right stuck in the category.
Releases by Calexico and DeVotchKa felt far too worldly to pigeonhole as folk or country, for instance, while Blitzen Trapper's fantastic Furr smells more like the Kinks than Neil Young. [Editor's note: That's why we put it on our indie-rock list.] We likewise discarded Shearwater's near-masterpiece Rook, despite the fact that the album
Name: Ryan "adr" Clark Blog: The Skyline Network URL: www.theskyline.netStarted: Late 2006, early 2007Typical Topics: Local music - concert reviews, album reviews, gossipDay Job: I do marketing and communication for an oil gas company.Hair Balls: How did The Skyline Network enter the blogosphere? adr: It started out as a parody news site. I was mostly just taking inside jokes about music in Houston and extrapolating them out into ridiculous full-length articles. At some point, writing that way g
If productivity alone conferred greatness, then flinty rock scribbler Dave Thompson would be the Trollope of pop-culture quick reads. I Hate New Music is the latest of over 100 titles this insta-book wizard has blinked into being. And dig the intro penned by the legendary Richard Meltzer, the Big Bang of exhibitionist gonzo rock criticism. The former Noise Boy delivers his usual caveman-crit jibber-jabber, while making creative use of the CAPS lock and asterisk keys on his steam-powered IBM Word
Photos by Marc Brubaker/ Click here for slideshows from Day 1 and Day 2Times New Viking​
If there's anything that Aftermath truly loves about music (outside of watching talented people create outstanding art), it's the innate propensity the medium possesses to bring people together. There is something so idealistically communal about watching a show with five, twenty, one hundred, or five hundred of your friends (some new, some old) and knowing that you're sharing a very special experience.
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