It’s been a long road for Toronto’s Easy Way Out. They started out as an instrumental rock trio that couldn’t find a reliable vocalist, only to suddenly find they had two.
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Last summer, the members of Toronto’s Bellevue decided to do something constructive with a long weekend; they hauled ass to a cabin on the north shore of Lake Huron and spent three solid days recording the tracks that would become The Road to Recovery. The band’s sophomoric effort follows up 2007’s Lost in Space with a solid dozen hook-laden guitar-oriented pop tunes centred around Brent Hough’s distinctive baritone.
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Asian-American hip-hop dynamo Lyrics Born is dropping a new full length this week, and if you need something to shake your rump to you could do a whole lot worse.
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The Billie Burke Estate is essentially a one-man recording project put together by Seattle’s Andy Liotta with the help of drummer Zak Schaffer. The Estate’s second album, entitled Let Your Heart Break, is a collection of smart, upbeat pop songs with a decidedly retro feel.
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By this stage in his career, a new record from Billy Bragg is like a visit from a long lost friend: it’s great to get a fresh new perspective on all the things that made you like him in the beginning, but you also get to see all the little details that led to the estrangement in the first place.
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Somewhere along the line, someone in Philadelphia’s Man Man must’ve accidentally spun Swordfish Trombones at 45 RPM and gotten hooked on the sound. For the uninitiated, imagine if you will a mix of Tom Waits, Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart pureed in a blender, filtered through punk sensibility, served up on a platter of childlike wonder with unbridled exuberance and recorded in bayou juke-joint in the forties. That’s Man Man for you.
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How does a band from Denver end up sounding like an exotic blend of disparate folk stylings? Well, if the band is DeVotchKa, they pull it off by having a singer (Nick Urata) descended from Sicilian and Gypsy ancestors, a classically trained violinist (Tom Hagerman), a bassist (Jeanie Schroder) who used to play sousaphone in a Civil War recreationist band, and a drummer (Shawn King) that also doubles on trumpet and was raised by Lithuanian polka musicians. I guess with such a diverse patchwork of influences, there ain’t no way in hell this band’s going to sound commonplace.
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This record’s been out for a while on the other side of the pond, but now David Ford’s long-awaited follow-up to 2006’s I Sincerely Apologize For All the Trouble I’ve Caused is being released in North America courtesy of the good people at Original Signal Recordings.
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So, this is what the kids in New Hampshire are up to these days, eh?
I have to admit that Our Last Night’s debut full length release, The Ghosts Among Us, really threw me for a loop. The first 30 seconds of the opening track, “Symptoms of a Failing System,” made me wonder whether I’d want to listen to the rest of the disc at all. I’m not the biggest fan of contemporary hardcore punk, to say the least. So let’s just say that I was a little stunned at the half-minute mark to learn about the band’s split personality.
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One look at their obnoxiously bright MySpace page is all you need to know that Philly’s Br’er are pretty much the weirdest thing you’ll ever hear. The instrumentation goes from eclectic to abrasive at the drop of a hat and the song structures like to seek out their own meandering paths that make a mockery of traditional verse/chorus structures, and sometimes even the most curious listener will be tempted to duck and cover, but there’s something fascinating about it all that definitely warrants repeat listenings.
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