Search Results for "Michael Baker"

With discordant slabs of authentic Americana and misery, the female guitar/drum duo Mr. Airplane Man borrows its name, jagged tones and quaking backbeats from Howlin’ Wolf, the archetype of messy, blues-soaked power. Veterans of bars, self-produced singles and disappointment, the Bostonians compare favorably to other roots duos who have discovered themselves in the Mississippi Delta…

Illinois expats residing in Brooklyn, the brother-sister art rock band Fiery Furnaces has, in two albums, successfully taken on large chunks of 20th Century music and spat back explosive fragments reformed in moving, experimental, funky odes celebrating impossible-to-pronounce places, obscure baseball greats, granny’s cooking and the King of Spain. Sonically dominated by Eleanor Friedberger’s cranky,…

Released after a decade of playing together and five years of record company hassle, Asleep in the Back introduced Elbow to the world as Prog Rockers with chips on their shoulders. Signed and dropped by both Island and EMI, then picked up by V2 after two Uglyman EPs, the Manchester quintet made an ambitious, theatrical…

The Coral, who hail from Hoylake, Merseyside, a village on England’s west coast, can attribute their self-assurance and evolving mastery at least partially to their outsider status, youth and a high-spirited sense of experimentation. Extraordinary singing and consistently fine production by Ian Broudie don’t hurt any, but, most of all, the Coral are great because…

Remarkable for its ethereal musical maturity, the Icelandic chamber rock band Sigur Rós (“Victory Rose”) in three extended albums has re-shaped notions of the potentially synergistic cross currents of trance minimalism and orchestrated pop music. Founded in 1994 by guitarist and vocalist Jón Bór Birgisson, drummer Ágúst (later replaced by Orri Páll Dýrason) and bassist…

As much as the seven shambling popsters of Glasgow’s Belle and Sebastian do not want to be everyday heroes — playing microscopic venues, praying at Felt’s bizarre Tom Verlaine hero-worshiping altar, withholding personnel information on releases, shunning publicity photos and to this day favoring the EP format over album — they have turned out some…

Friends since college in the mid-1980’s, winners of a Musician magazine award for best unsigned band and guitarists/singers/songwriters/snarling Southern revisionists, the brilliant Mike Cooley and Patterson Hood (son of Muscle Shoals bassist David Hood) dug down and dirty into the axle grease and bootlegged rotgut for Drive-By Truckers, the most provocative band of the New…

Even if there are many antecedents for Antony and the Johnsons’ brave music, and even if others less (and more) talented have mined sumptuous cabaret/lounge white soul before, no one has merged the elusive, silvery sounds of confessional torture with the improv spirit of West Coast jazz like he does. And he, the one-named androgyne…

On the opening power pop chords of “Days Gone By,” which begins this Seattle band’s intermittently stellar album of cheer-laden, hook-driven pop, the musical weapons and influences are drawn and pointedly visible: male Breeders, grungy Teenage Fanclub, joyful Bob Mould. The second song, “Bottle Rockets,” bursts out of its tight clothes in an unremitting rhythmic…

The first Matmos album is a disappointment. A sense of ennui permeates the performances, and gifted Bay Area sonic assemblers Andrew Daniel and Martin Schmidt haven’t got their studio legs yet. The beats, never simply dancefloor driven nor exercises in youthful ebullience, do not combine a later embrace of transcendental experimentation and hip-hoppy beatdowns. But…

A son of Sheffield steel, the very British Richard Hawley, a sometimes guitar-player for the Longpigs, Pastels and Pulp, has mined those late-’60s/early-’70s production paragons of sense and sensibility (think of records by Petula Clark, Serge Gainsbourg, Jimmy Webb, Marty Robbins, Dean Martin) to build sumptuous, slightly overblown albums of elaborate pop. Unafraid to tastefully…

There is so much to admire about this Oregon duo, including their reclamation of rock’s initial outsider’s status; their reckless refusal to compromise edgy, strident music into paths of comfortable commercialism; their steadfast insistence on the primacy of left-wing causes; and their rhythmic scrimmages. That Quasi has so codified its MO that recent albums have…

Although facts hardly define the audacious and experimental nature of their fiercely iconoclastic and thrilling music, let’s begin here: Erase Errata is Jenny Hoysten (singer and amateur trumpeter), Sara Jaffe (funkster guitarist), Ellie Erickson (in-need-of-Valium bassist) and Bianca Sparta (tribal drummer, whose cavestompings begin and end here, there and everywhere). They come from the San…