RECOMMENDED Last year’s “Everything All the Time” was one of the best straight-up indie-rock records heard in a long time, easily the best of its kind from 2006, an accomplishment that put Sub Pop artists Band of Horses on world radar as it drew inevitable comparisons to My Morning Jacket, but also attention to leader Ben Bridwell and crew’s gift for crafting anthemic hooks and emotive, but never over-the-top, lyrical tomes. “Cease to Begin,” again on Sub Pop, is the band’s newest record, and finds the group shifting away from the rock and leaning more toward the alt-country, which makes sense, given the change of scenery (the band relocated from Washington state to South Carolina). The result? Solid, but ultimately less powerful and cohesive than “Everything All the Time.” At some moments, it meanders a bit in melodramatic melancholy, and at others, it’s exquisite, like on “No One’s Gonna Love You” and the charmingly titled “Detlef Schrempf” (perhaps the best song ever named after an obscure NBA player). Blended with the “Everything All the Time” material, however, this should be a show of gorgeous peaks and valleys. (Tom Lynch) Sunday, November 11 at Metro
The Incredible Expanding Band: A Preview of The Claudettes at 210 Live The Claudettes’ sound is hard to pin down; there’s a strong foundation of barrelhouse and stride piano jazz, but there’s plenty of boogie-woogie in there as well. And even on its first album, the band delivered its original music with a punk attitude.
Once an “It” Band, Still an Influencer: The Strokes Get It Done During a Tight Lolla Set Julian Casablancas has an inimitable voice that has not so much aged well as not aged at all, and Hammond’s guitar work remains glorious. You don’t have to dance at a Strokes show but you do need to move: the band’s best tracks are fast, fierce and over before you know it, the abrupt ending being something of a Strokes…
Oh, to Be a Violent Femme: The Outsider Origins of an Iconic Band It’s hard these days to convey the simple offense the Violent Femmes were to 1980s musical culture. Now that they’re heralded as a classic band, assimilated by long-tradition listeners into roots music, you could almost be forgiven for miscalculating the degree of radicalism that was in their stripped-down, punked-out sound.
In Praise of Pegboy: A Chicago Punk Band, Thirty Years On What stands out on the debut EP is the quality of the songs and Larry Damore’s vocals, blunt to the point of sounding almost bone-headed but never diminishing his bleeding-heart passion.
Do It Again: A Preview of Brian Wilson at Horseshoe Hammond While today former bandmate Mike Love leads a group calling itself the Beach Boys, that band features no Brian Wilson. Wilson’s group, on the other hand, includes original Beach Boys member Al Jardine as well as late-prime-era Beach Boy Blondie Chaplin, and is jaw-droppingly facile at recreating the Beach Boys sound.
