Daniel Alexander Jones as Jomama Jones in Radiate
Category: Critic’s Choice
Posted inMusic
ST. LAWRENCE STRING QUARTET AND ANTON KUERTI
The St. Lawrence Quartet, a Canadian group founded in 1989, has earned a reputation for spontaneity and informal persuasiveness. Their latest CD, of three Shostakovich quartets, stresses the music’s humanity; […]
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Chemical Brothers
The late-90s big-beat fad pushed dance music into the U.S. mainstream–in the process providing car manufacturers with a decade’s worth of music for their, err, racier commercials–but few of its […]
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SILVER APPLES
I have to admit I did a double take when I first saw this listing: they’re tempting fate again? The history of Silver Apples, the New York ur-electronica duo famed […]
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Adventures in Modern Music
The London-based avant-garde monthly the Wire, which has increased steadily in gloss and sales over the years while remaining committed to very unglossy music, recognizes how much Chicago has given […]
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Aesop Rock
Aesop Rock is a man of ideas. So many, in fact, that it’s hard to keep track of them all. He hasn’t released a lot of records in the ten […]
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ACID MOTHERS GURU GURU
Contemporary psychedelia often raises the question, hasn’t inner space been explored enough already? Well, yes and no. The psychedelic experience, like the religious one, is unique to the individual–while there’s […]
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KEN VANDERMARK
In Musician, Dan Kraus’s new documentary about saxophonist and clarinetist Ken Vandermark, there’s a moment when he sings an extraordinarily complex figure to his band–and then the film cuts to […]
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MUHAL RICHARD ABRAMS
The defining spirit and driving force of the AACM, pianist Muhal Richard Abrams set out on his own path more than 40 years ago, believing that compliance with the artistic […]
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A SUNNY DAY IN GLASGOW
Remember that Remington ad where the guy liked the shaver so much he bought the company? I can’t tell you how many times I played A Sunny Day in Glasgow’s […]
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Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Chorus
Verdi’s Requiem was inspired by the deaths of two of Italy’s beacons of culture and identity: Rossini and Manzoni. The seed of the work–the concluding “Libera Me”–was Verdi’s contribution to […]
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A.R. RAHMAN
Dubbed the “Asian Mozart” by the Daily Telegraph, 41-year-old composer A.R. Rahman redefined contemporary Indian film music in the early 90s, transforming a style that was formulaic and drowning in […]
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SIR RICHARD BISHOP
In February we lost a great musician and a great band at once: after drummer Charles Gocher died of cancer at 54, his coconspirators of 25 years, the Bishop brothers, […]
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ADULT., TUSSLE
Perhaps the truest line in the verbose manifesto that accompanies Adult.’s fourth album, Why Bother? (Thrill Jockey), is the relatively concise “We lack a casualness.” With the urgent restlessness and […]