The album of the spring has been Cat Power's, Sun (2012). This is new ground for Chan Marshall - an electronic pop/rock album. It's political and intense but feels upbeat and actually makes me want to dance, which is not something I thought I'd ever say about  a Cat Power album. I can't really pick a single track as a favorite, but here's 3,6,9.   ( Read more... )

Johnny Cash's American Recordings (1994) is perfect music for dark, winter evenings. It's a comeback record that marks the beginning of Cash's immensely creative partnership with Rick Rubin. I think it's worth getting for the cover of Leonard Cohen's 'Bird on a Wire' alone. Steve Earle's Transcendental Blues (2000) is an all-round brilliant folk ( Read more... )

 
Crossposted to This Wheel of Many Parts
This entry was originally posted at http://tea-drinker77.dreamwidth.org/ Please comment there using OpenID.

How much Leonard Cohen have I been listening to recently? So much that I seem to have fairly well spanned his career, starting with Songs of Love and Hate (1970) and ending with his latest album, Old Ideas. My mother says that Songs of Love and Hate is “just groaning”, but for me this is an album so miserable that it manages to cross the line into ( Read more... )

I think these music posts are always going to run a couple of weeks late.
I got Kristin Hersh’s live album Cats and Mice for Christmas.  Recorded in San Francisco in 2009, it has a generous 19 tracks drawn mostly from Learn to Sing Like a Star and Crooked, and an excellent production.  I gave the Throwing Muses’s 1996 album Limbo an outing, although ( Read more... )

Album of the Month

P J Harvey, Let England Shake

I’m a big PJ Harvey fan and I love her new album.  Musically it’s subdued for Harvey and seems to be placed in the British neo-folk tradition.  It’s an incredibly well-crafted album and you can feel the thought that’s gone into every song.  It’s dark theme of war is brought out more effectively by ( Read more... )