The Tallest Man on Earth There’s No Leaving Now (Dead Oceans) A new Tallest Man on Earth album is something akin to opening a box of trinkets you weren’t aware you had — his music can generate impossible nostalgia for sights and sounds unknown. Four years after the Swedish singer-songwriter’s excellent debut LP Shallow...
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The Walkmen Heaven (Fat Possum) The Walkmen are fearless. Ten years after appearing on the indie stage with an almost reluctant prettiness, they’ve come to celebrate the inherent romanticism in their spacious, warmly direct sound. But even by the unabashedly lovesick standards of You and Me and Lisbon, Heaven is something of a shock....
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On his own, the always raucous and divisive White achieved what none of his various bands and projects ever have — an entrance at the top of the Billboard chart, with his solo debut Blunderbuss. This of course is sometimes (Cake, Amos Lee) a dubious honor in recent years — though this week he...
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Surfer Blood Tarot Classics EP (Kanine) For all the fierce hype that initially greeted Florida’s Surfer Blood, their debut album Astro Coast didn’t receive the attention it deserved, and it’s hard to say what intrigued Warner Bros. about the sweet, emotionally heavy surf-rock revivalists. The foursome can’t escape trials of maturity and the fame...
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Twin Sister In Heaven (Domino) Forgoing the throwback tendencies that tend to hamper a lot of dreampop, the splendid debut from this sprightly Long Island quintet shows little interest in the ethereal beauty of clear antecedents like Cocteau Twins and Lush. This instead is a thrillingly direct collection of robust hooks, underlined by the...
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Two scholarly types craft pop throwbacks; it’s not rock ‘n’ roll, but we like it John Maus We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves (Ribbon Music) You could be forgiven for not wanting to enjoy John Maus’ music after some particularly eyebrow-raising comments he made about the decline of record shops in America;...
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Male Bonding: Endless Now (Sub Pop) The unfussy Nothing Hurts, UK punk melodicists Male Bonding’s 2010 debut, had a charm no acquisition of maturity or fame could duplicate. How bold, then, for the Londoners to wait scarcely a year to censure themselves to sophomore slump accusations; that confidence makes Endless Now a delight, even...
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The bestowing of the UK’s Mercury Prize upon Polly Jean Harvey’s Let England Shake is a heartening moment beyond the typical cultural reach of the award, for two reasons: The first is that she’s the only person in the nearly two-decade history of the honor to receive it twice, which is nifty enough. The...
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The seminal Ohio folk rockers Over the Rhine released a fine new album, The Long Surrender, last month – check out the MT review here — and now the band will be making a stop at The Ark in Ann Arbor this Tuesday (April 5). After beginning life as a four-piece in 1991,...
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Capitol’s official announcement via Billboard this week that the Beach Boys’ Smile will see release in 2011 — on the heels of a quickly retracted offhand remark by Al Jardine that gave the game away — is the latest in an eternal line of proposed releases for the troubled, long-delayed project that was intended...
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