Articles By: Nathan Caldwell 
"Fabulous in Flannel" I am a working class butch who keeps it all barely together by making movies.
Comparing Two Big Bangs: Indie and Rock
Rolling Stone is the old geezer of rock magazines. Whether it’s still relevant is debatable, but it is certainly venerated on a social and, to a lesser extent, critical level. It was and is, in people’s memory, foremost among early rock magazines. Just the words “Rolling Stone” call to mind the music of the late 60s, which the magazine fetishizes to an almost myopic degree; within the top 20 albums on their “500 Greatest Albums List,” 11 are from the [...]
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Kurt Vile – Smoke Ring for My Halo review
This publication missed Kurt Vile’s excellent Smoke Ring for My Halo when it came out in March. But now that Kurt’s got an EP coming out, I figure it’s as good a time as any to review the album. The cover of the forthcoming EP, So Outta Reach, shows a bunch of different shots of an unkempt Kurt Vile asleep sitting up in a big armchair at some party, and in each picture somebody has their arm around him and [...]
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PG Six – Starry Mind review
Electric folk with subtly complicated jams. Doesn’t really sound of this era, which is part of what makes it interesting–it’s refreshing to listen to an old-sounding record and know that it’s from today. One song is called “Wrong Side of Yesterday.” True, this record sounds more 1960s than 2010s, but it also sounds more San Francisco than New York, which is where he’s from. “January” is an Irish traditional, but the way they jam on it sounds very much like the [...]
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Acoustic Alchemy – Roseland review
In 1981, Simon James and Nick Webb formed the instrumental jazz-pop guitar duo Acoustic Alchemy. If you hear the words “instrumental jazz-pop” and want to run and hide, that’s understandable. The truth is, it’s been thirty years, and while change is a given when you’re talking about that kind of time, the duo does still sound stuck in the eighties. Neither of the original members is in it anymore. James left early on, and Webb died in ’98 of pancreatic [...]
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DRC Music – Kinshasa One Two review
Damon Albarn is best-known as the leader of Blur and then multi-media act the Gorillaz, but he’s also an experienced globe-trotter. In 2002 he put out Mali Music after traveling through that country, recording the music of artists he found along the way, and adding keyboards and drums ‘n’ sich back in London. The result was a surprisingly sedate album that really did sound like Albarn’s take on Mali, not just something Malian or something Albarn. The guy’s got a [...]
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DJ Shadow – The Less You Know, The Better review
After his awesome, universally acclaimed ’96 debut, Endtroducing, instrumental hip-hop and sampling aficionado DJ Shadow waited six years to release his follow-up, The Private Press. During those six years his style changed more than it has since or is likely to ever again. No longer was he an “instrumental hip-hop artist”–because screw labels, man–but he wanted to defy classification, pulling in elements from a wider variety of music. That album’s most notable new element was the guitar, both acoustic and [...]
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Four Tet – FabricLive 59 review
Fabric is a London club which, over the past decade, has become world-famous among DJs and fans of house. One of the contributing factors to its increase in notoriety was the 2001 establishment of the Fabric Mix Series. Once a month the club releases a CD showcasing a well-known or emerging DJ. The series alternates every month between the titles fabric and FabricLive, the difference between the two being one of genre: fabric tends to feature more house or techno, [...]
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Mogwai – Earth Division EP review
To every modern pop decade its uncreative flab. To the late-60s, surrealistic, musically boring psychedelia. To the mid-70s, witless, castrated soft rock. To the 80s, Madonna- and Prince-rip-offs. And of course the 90s saw the rise of mainstream alternative which prioritized sleekness and profits over subversiveness and emotion. The sound that has dogged that last five years is the lame-brained, tasteless, precious symphonic crap dignified with the name indie. Like Nirvana simultaneously giving new life to and killing alternative, Arcade [...]
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The Field – Looping State of Mind review
Patience is a virtue, and it’s one that Axel Willner, benevolent minimalist behind Swedish techno act the Field, wants to teach us. His music exists beautifully–it’s so subtle–and that’s why he calls himself “the Field” and not “the City”; he hopes to thwart our hustle-and-bustle impulses and open our eyes and ears to life’s quiet slownesses. His new album, Looping State of Mind, works well either as foreground or background music. Willner’s songs are careful constructions. To listen is to [...]
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Toro y Moi – Freaking Out EP review
Toro y Moi is the stage name of Columbia, SC native Chaz Bundick. Since 2001 he’s been recording on his own, but he remained dormant until last year’s Causers of This. The album was dense in sound, overwhelmed by low-end, but dreamy in content, and, like the material of a dream, it slipped away once the record ended. February 2011’s Underneath the Pine found Toro heading in a new direction, complementing his synths with actual drums and guitars; making the [...]
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