Album Of The Week: The Sadies

The Sadies
New Seasons
Yep Roc
There is a certain class of band, the kind that have a unique sound but rarely deviate from it, and sometimes it ends up limiting their creativity and longevity. I’d place the Old 97’s in that category, as the old joke about them is that they have two songs—the fast one and [...]

Rock ‘n’ Roll Magnetism

Great bands don’t come out of nowhere, like some rip in the space-time continuum opens up and Led Zeppelin drops out of the sky or something—most really good bands take years to get that way. Look at Nada Surf, who hit their stride with Let Go, a decade after “Popular” nearly doomed them to one-hit [...]

Album of the week: Mountain Heart

This is the first in what I’ll try to make a weekly feature here, spotlighting a recent release.
Mountain Heart
Road That Never Ends
Rural Rhythm
Unless you’re a bluegrass fan, chances are you’re not familiar with Mountain Heart, who just released Road That Never Ends: The Live Album. Unlike Nickel Creek, Sam Bush, or Alison Krauss, they haven’t [...]

The Next Worst American Band

The next great American band
When Simon Fuller of American Idol announced the full-band version of “American Idol,” I’ll admit I was curious to see how the format would fit. Like a national ‘battle of the bands’, the show’s first episode included some good music and some wretched music—no William Hung eviscerations of pop songs, at [...]

The Whole of the Moon

Despite all the reported death throes of terrestrial radio, there are times when it can still pack a punch. Driving around town with the family today, running errands, “The Whole of the Moon” by the Waterboys came on the local community alternative radio station WXRY-FM 99.3 (not to be confused with the much cooler but [...]

Return to Blue Mountain

Back in 1993, I was briefly living in Charlotte, North Carolina, and one of my favorite local bands was the HardSoul Poets (later to morph into the band Jolene). Twice that summer they brought some friends of theirs from Mississippi to open shows for them, a band called Blue Mountain. All I remember of those [...]

2007 Music Crawl Report

KO’s Music Crawl Wrap-Up
With another Music Crawl come and gone, here are my impressions of what I saw and heard. I typically try to see at least the bands in the lineup that I have never seen play a live show before, and there were ten of those this year, a higher number than usual [...]

Turn Up The Radiohead??

So by now you’ve probably heard about Radiohead’s pay-what-you-want strategy for their upcoming album release, and heard lots of noise about this being a daring new business model for the music industry. If not, click through this text for the basic story.
There is at least one big thing wrong with this scenario, however. Despite their [...]

Doyle Lawson’s lesson in professionalism

So I went to Mt. Horeb United Methodist last night to see one of my favorite bluegrass acts, Doyle Lawson & Quicksilver. despite it being a Sunday night way out in the sticks near Lake Murray, the place was packed, probably between 400-500 in attendance. I made it inside just as they were starting, so [...]