“…There’s a segment of the accounting-undergrad listening class that can’t get enough Death Cabs and Belles & Sebastians, and, with tax time nearing, we owe it to these people to acknowledge the fact that they have ears…”
Athol Fugard – Tsotsi
“…Tsotsi, is a compelling and brutal tale that follows the life of the story’s eponymous protagonist. Set in Sophiatown, Fugard uses the oppression of the apartheid regime as a backdrop for the novel’s main setting: deep-rooted racism, the abject poverty of the black community, brooding violence…”
Hanzel und Gretyl – Zwanzig Zwolf
“…This jackboot-industrial twosome look and sound like they come from the wrong side of the German political tracks, but they’re in fact New Yorkers dressed in the fetish-club duds you’d kill to see at your local karaoke bar. Slowly but surely, more acts are partaking of the noxious Hitler-doom atmosphere first stolen and transmogrified from Skinny Puppy’s genius by Marilyn Manson, ie KMFDM, Combichrist, half of what Dancing Ferret Records is releasing…”
Chris Abani – Becoming Abigail
“…In the UK right now, there is a real taste for true-life biographies about child abuse. Every bookshop has a section dedicated to small volumes with titles like “Please Daddy No”and “A Child Called It”. It’s redolent of Alan Partridge: “I’d like to understand man’s inhumanity to man… and then make a programme about it.” On the face of it, Chris Abani’s novella Becoming Abigail should fit right in there. It is ostensibly about the traumas and abuses suffered by a young Nigerian girl caught up in the skin trade…”
Shirley Hazzard – People in Glass Houses
“…If there’s one quality that defines Shirley Hazzard’s People in Glass Houses, it’s subtlety. This collection of eight short stories is a masterpiece of observation which clearly demonstrates the author’s perceptive wit… Set in the 1950s, amidst the corridors and offices of the newly-created monolithic and meandering bureaucracy of “the Organization” – an American-based concern intent on ‘inflicting improvement’ the world over…”
Raveonettes – Lust Lust Lust
“…It’s not enough simply to let off wall-of-sound grease-fires over pretty 1960s pop songs – anybody can do that. But after listening to Lust Lust Lust with an open – okay, reverent – mind, one could argue that Dutch coed duo Raveonettes have created something not just important but essential…”
Neil Smith – Bang Crunch
“… It has become something of a self-fulfilling prophecy that the publishing industry can’t sell debut short story collections… Because the major publishing houses don’t publish much short fiction – and rarely back it with a marketing campaign when they do – the public quite rightly tends to assume that these short story collections aren’t worth reading. If they were then they’d be making more of a fuss of them, right?…”
Gram Rabbit – RadioAngel & the RobotBeat
“…At first listen, Gram Rabbit’s new LP sounds veritably commercial in comparison to their last two albums, which bet their futures on weird psychedelic quasi-electro. In particular, their 2006 Cultivation album was strangely captivating – no, I’ll just say it, great – on the strength of Jessika von Rabbit’s sexy but unattainable teasing…”
Ross Macdonald – The Barbarous Coast
“…Punctuated by a sharp, dark wit, and twisting subtly through an untold number of well-plotted revelations, this novel shows why Macdonald was considered the natural successor to the likes of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. It also makes for a damned good read…”
Tom Hodgkinson – How To Be Idle
“…Not only is How to be Idle thoroughly entertaining, it should resonate with anyone, except the most puritanical workaholic bores, who has ever questioned how our lives have become to be dominated by work, time, and the need to be constantly doing something, or feeling guilty for being inactive…”
Martin Amis – House Of Meetings
“…Any new Martin Amis book always comes with plenty of baggage, and House Of Meetings is no exception. As his first full-length fiction since 2003’s Yellow Dog, it comes complete with high expectations and the ugly face of his previous achievements leering over its shoulder. You can almost hear the critics sharpening their knives even before it hits the shelves…”
Joseph M Marshal III – Hundred in the Hand
“…For decades the story of the American West has been told from the point of view of the white settlers, the ‘cowboys’ in all those childhood games of Cowboys and Indians. This novel sets out to redress that balance: it’s set in the American West, but it’s told from the point of view of the Lakota people, and is written by a surviving Lakota member…”
Black Mountain – In The Future
“…Indie pseudo-stoner bands are forever treating your average suburban Zep/Sabbath/GNR listener the way Lucy treats Charlie Brown, pulling the football away just when the potential record buyer is about to take the plunge…”
Dub Trio – Another Sound is Dying
Eric Saeger The brazen title for this mostly instrumental album could be interpreted as a tolling of the bell for many genres, not dub in particular (or barely even in passing, really; if anyone should be hearing a call-out it’s the Melvins, not Satori). The songs are genre-shish-kebabs that would in less competent hands be […]
Insane Clown Posse – Jugganauts
Eric Saeger Try as you might, you may not have the right stuff to become a Juggalo, ie a card-carrying Insane Clown Posse fan capable of displaying the proper head-trauma behavior. ICP connoisseurs won’t give this best-of the time of day because it’s comprised only of songs featured in the three Island Records releases, and […]
Lisa Loeb – The Purple Tape
Eric Saeger 90s geek-pixie Lisa Loeb kills a few birds by including a full CD’s worth of softball NPR-style interviews along with the first-ever digital release of The Purple Tape. One: yes, even she looks back in horror at the white dress with cowboy boots ensembles; second, back in the day, she didn’t know what […]
Dengue Fever – Venus on Earth
Eric Saeger World-music albums come and go, but virtually none get handed a fluke editor’s choice pick on Amazon.com and explode the way Dengue Fever did, winning over many bored critics in the US hipster community in a similarly inexplicable series of events. The band’s first album and Venus, their third, differ only in that […]
Patty Larkin – Watch the Sky
Eric Saeger Senior citizen Patty Larkin once wrote a song called “Not Bad for a Broad” to poke fun at the Guitar Player nerds who fawn over her talent, but the Berklee grad’s songwriting – nay, album-writing – sense far overshadows her technical ability. What a rare thing that is, and what a velvety, dense, […]
Fight – The War of Words: Demos
Eric Saeger Cynics the world over have long viewed Rob Halford’s predeliction for leather, studs and long-haired androgynous guitar boys as proof that there’s something snidely comical up his sleeve, that he chortles (and/or lusts) in private over the rough, tough, forked-finger-saluting Sweathogs that comprise his audience. Whether or not that’s true, sometimes the coolest […]
Various Artists – Well Deep: Ten Years of Big Dada Records
Eric Saeger It’s not absolutely essential to have reams of information uploaded to your skull in order to get a handle on indie hip-hop, but over the years Big Dada has been home to the most bizarre trips and aliases in the underground. Albeit a British label, the Ninja Tune-owned company has provided workout space […]
ASG – Win Us Over
Eric Saeger It may indeed be that modern math-metal is ignored by most people, who favor instead old Zep and whatnot, but the truth is that today’s bands are “better” than their ancestors simply because they have to be. It’s part of evolutionary design. Even people who fancy themselves progressively minded write off things that […]
Various Artists – Monterey Jazz Festival: 50th Anniversary All-Stars
Eric Saeger Outside the fringes of pop culture dwell many artists whose existence is news to you regardless of their high-level accomplishments, a phenomenon suffered by jazz players more commonly than anyone else. With no small degree of casualness we tick off the list of career highlights accomplished by the individual members of the jazz […]
Arthur Nersesian – The Swing Voter of Staten Island
“…Arthur Nersesian’s The Fuck-Up, in addition to having one of the best slacker-lit titles ever to have been put down on paper, has garnered something of a cult following since its publication in 1997, and rightly so… In comparison, The Swing Voter Of Staten Island is a big disappointment…”
Russell Hoban – My Tango With Barbara Strozzi
“…Centre stage is given to a depiction of Barbara Strozzi herself, the seventeenth century Venetian singer and composer of the book’s title, but surrounding her is the paraphernalia of Hoban’s story. There are glass eyes, a baseball bat, the HMS Victory, an astrological constellation and a 24-hour pizza restaurant. And, of course, the basic steps to learn the tango…”
Sontiago – Steel Yourself
Eric Saeger The two or three adventurer-listener readers out there familiar with Anticon’s catalog of avant-hip-hop records will know what I mean when I say that this is very San Francisco. A native Pennsylvanian, rapper/singer Sonya Tomlinson is nowadays a cog in the Portland, Maine scene, the most ambitious and enthusiastically supported accumulation of New […]
