Hopey Fink

In our collective imaginations, spring is a time of newness – it’s been glorified and beautified by poets, artists, and musicians for centuries as a symbol of renewal and life.  But the springtime also carries with it the knowledge of impending endings.  Whether you’re a graduating senior or an underclassman saying goodbye to college friends for the summer, you’ll probably have to face a few departures and farewells in the next month or so.  Hem’s sixth full-length album, Departure and Farewell, captures the bittersweetness of partings and new starts with a lyrical and musical eloquence reminiscent of wistful springtime poetry.  Read More »

It’s not a happy thing for me to accept, but winter seems to be clinging to its last few days with a pathetically sinister little snow-claw.  I know that just around the corner is a glorious spring – and I can’t wait for it – but there’s something about being the last of something that commands a bit of respect — so to that ugly swirl the other day, I nodded an understanding on the condition that it really was the last snow of the season.   Read More »

For someone who was nominated for a Grammy in 2011 (Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical for sophomore release The Next Right Thing), Seth Glier has a relatively sparse Internet presence: his Wikipedia page lacks a photo, and he hasn’t been reviewed by Pitchfork. Read More »

You ever have those moments when you happen upon a song that fits perfectly with the thoughts you were right in the middle of having? A few days ago, a friend showed me the song “Baghdad Children” by The Horse Flies, an American folk/alternative rock band founded in the 1970s.  I shouted “this is perfect!” and have been playing it on loop ever since.

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Looking at the tiny stage before Brown Bird’s set at the Black Cat this past Thursday evening, an uninformed concertgoer may have been expecting a troupe of six or seven people to squeeze together and claim the various instruments that lay in waiting.  A standup bass, an electric bass, a cello, a violin, a bass drum, a few tambourines and other percussion instruments, and guitars both acoustic and electric were carefully arranged between two hand-painted chairs, one reading “BROWN” and the other “BIRD.”  Read More »

Looking at a September sunset that perfectly matches the cover of the Boy EP at the end of a high school football game, using a ladle as a microphone while unloading the dishwasher to “Can You Tell,” family-road-tripping with the windows down as we blast Gorilla Manor, surviving my first finals week of college by watching the La Blogotheque video of “Who Knows, Who Cares” about seven thousand times…Ra Ra Riot and Local Natives have in many ways formed the core of my life’s soundtrack for the past few years.

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“Mistaking clouds for mountains”…oh, have you ever experienced one line of a song going around and around in your head until either you become sick or your life molds itself to the lyrics?  The latter occurred to me the other day.  I wouldn’t have been able to describe how exactly Mr. Andrew Bird’s words “Danse Caribe” felt so perfect in the moment, I just know that I had this intuitive feeling that they were meant for me.  In fact, the whole of the whistling-fiddling-glockenspieling songwriter’s latest album, Break It Yourself (March 6, 2012), is packed with feeling – little wisps and steamrolling blasts and punctuated pepperings of it.  This glorious record, with beautifully characteristically Bird-esque style and lyrics, is not only Bird’s most accessible yet, it’s also his best.

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Holden Caulfield, J.D. Salinger’s beloved, profane protagonist in the 1951 American classic Catcher in the Rye, has come to represent the struggle to balance innocence and maturity in a very teenage-angsty sort of way. Neo-folksy singer-songwriter Colin Caulfield, who goes by the moniker Young Man, shares more than a name with Salinger’s fictional young man. His first full-length album, Ideas of Distance, was released on September 27 by Frenchkiss Records and is hauntingly woven with contemplative lyrics about growing up and finding identity. Read More »