The Levon Helm Band at The Michigan Theater Ann Arbor, MI, March 19, 2012 Me and Levon go way back. Waaaay back. All the way back to… 1985 or so. I was in my early teens, the Bob Dylan box set Biograph had just come out, and I was listening to that a lot. My dad’s [...]

So after fighting through not one, but two Asia albums in a row and peeking ahead at the next slab of vinyl on the shelf and realizing it’s a record that actually belongs to my wife, I have decided to throw the first curveball and grab an “A” record out of the jazz bin.

Tennis – Young & Old (Fat Possum) Teaming up with the Black Keys’ Patrick Riley in a real Nashville studio, Tennis returns with a sophomore release that retains Cape Dory’s time machine rust while opening up the fidelity a bit to give the band — now a three piece with the inclusion of drummer James [...]

Van Halen – A Different Kind of Truth (Interscope) “Told you I was coming back,” deadpans David Lee Roth on “Blood And Fire,” one of the thirteen new tracks from A Different Kind of Truth, the band’s first album in 28 years. Thank God, Van Halen fans deserve this moment for all they have been [...]

The Fall – Ersatz GB (Cherry Red) Featuring the same band found on Your Future Our Clutter, The Fall’s twenty-ninth album sonically mirrors the previous effort with Mark E. Smith incorporating even more marbles in his mouth. And since Clutter was such a winner, Ersatz GB is more of the same, with the only disappointment [...]

When we last left off, I was saying that the Asia album you want is the one with “Heat of the Moment” on it. Well, this is not that album. But from about the first 15 seconds of Alpha, I’m thinking this one might just be a keeper.

Going back to the first time I ever heard Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica, I remember wondering, “What is going on here?” The second thought immediately following this was “Who on Earth would release this?” Even today, Trout Mask Replica stands out as a left-field landmark, an impressive opus that may not sound like a [...]

Magazine – No Thyself (Wire-Sound Records) “I don’t give a fuck about you too,” deadpans Howard Devoto on “Final Analysis Waltz” from the first new Magazine album in something like forever. The reality is that no one retires a band after four records only to reprise it over three decades later. And I don’t care [...]

So the first thing you may notice if you read my last column post, is that regardless of what kind of writer I am, I clearly don’t have a grasp of the alphabet. Or more to the point, I’ve done a really crappy job of organizing my records. Now I could waste a bunch of time going through and making sure that my records are indeed, alphabetized. Or I could spend the time actually listening. Clearly there is only one choice here, and that’s to forge ahead and pull the lp’s off the shelf in whatever order they are in and call it good.

Until recently, we’ve had a mild winter in the Midwest. There’s been very few days where temperatures fell below freezing and it was the first time in years when there wasn’t snow on the ground during Christmas. It was a challenge not to buy Kate Bush’s new album 50 Words For Snow when it was [...]