All Authors >

MICHAEL BRODEUR

Latest Articles

Sad hits

Damon & Naomi look back to fare forward
The cover of Damon & Naomi: The Sub Pop Years is framed like a Polaroid, and the image itself — a bluish superimposition of Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang — reads like an unfinished double exposure on old film, the pair caught mid bloom.

By: MICHAEL BRODEUR | September 16, 2009

Gus Gus | 24-7

Kompact (2009)
Letting the music take control is a primary tenet of the dance-floor ethos — but that's only because dance music is by nature submissive. Even at its most sonically rich, dance music remains a utility, and even when it demands your attention, it does so in service to your good times.

By: MICHAEL BRODEUR | September 15, 2009

Off the record?

Ten albums to get . . . while we still have albums
Pity the album. After a half-century of embarrassingly public body issues, our essential rock unit has not entered the new millennium looking very healthy. EPs are way more in vogue, MP3s have intangibility on their side, and 12-inches just sound impressive.

By: MICHAEL BRODEUR | September 14, 2009

Review: Polvo | In Prism

Merge (2009)
All a-bubble over my first listen to In Prism , I took to the Internet, where I learned that the album "is required listening for any bands still using guitars."

By: MICHAEL BRODEUR | September 09, 2009

Taken By Trees | East of Eden

Rough Trade (2009)
Truth be told, I get a little crumply whenever I hear of Western indie types going off on East-bound inspirational jaunts.

By: MICHAEL BRODEUR | September 02, 2009

Young folk

Lonesome Vince presents the Grand Ole Hoot
The long-beating heart of Boston's folk scene may be Club Passim — and the Cantab its liver — but its bloodstream runs all through town. I don't know that much about the circulatory system, so we'll nix this metaphor in just a bit, but suffice to say, a vibrant folk scene, whatever form it takes, is a sign of health for one's larger music community.

By: MICHAEL BRODEUR | September 04, 2009

Wild nights

For better or worse, gay life is ditching the bars
I don't need to break this news to you returning LGTBTQ-folk, but for those of you just joining us in Boston, a bitter little amuse bouche to start off this otherwise super-tasty survey of our current gay-nightlife situation: our gay bars kind of suck.

By: MICHAEL BRODEUR | August 31, 2009

West coasting

Is Project Runway walking in circles?
As I watched this season's 16 Project Runway hopefuls squinting into the setting sun during their champagne reception atop the Title Guarantee Building in Los Angeles, it was hard not to view the scene as a sad little metaphor for the state of the show. What's supposed to feel like the beginning of something new sure looks a lot more like the end of something old.

By: MICHAEL BRODEUR | August 26, 2009

Owing muses

Brian King sings his life in Venus As a Boy
A few days after I graduated from high school, the Internet showed up. "Well," I thought to myself. "That's just fucking great."

By: MICHAEL BRODEUR | August 25, 2009

A. A. Bondy | When the Devil's Loose

Fat Possum (2009)
I just don't get most of alt-country — what is it even alting us out of at this point?

By: MICHAEL BRODEUR | August 25, 2009

Sally Shapiro | My Guilty Pleasure

Paper Bag (2009)
One of the best things about Disco Romance , the 2007 debut album from Sally Shapiro, was its effortless channeling of the wistful spirit of vintage Italo-disco.

By: MICHAEL BRODEUR | August 19, 2009

Earth tones

The 2009 Boston Green Fest cleans up nice
Last year, I went to a landfill. It was awful. Our trash-filled van was briskly waved past a row of methane vents (each perma-farting blue flames into the sky) and toward a road that coiled up around the main hill — which wasn't so much a hill as it was 4.25 million tons of fucking disgusting .

By: MICHAEL BRODEUR | August 18, 2009

Review: Talbot Tagora | Lessons in the Woods or a City

Hardly Art (2009)
If you came up as a rail-thin indie kid in the '90s listening to aggressively confusing guitar rock and are now a bit fatter and wondering why nobody is ripping the fuck out anymore, then 1) I probably already know you, so hey, and 2) holy shit, have you heard Talbot Tagora?

By: MICHAEL BRODEUR | August 10, 2009

From Sir, with love

Paul McCartney, live at Fenway, on August 5, 2009
However people go about justifying an expensive rock experience — whether laundering it through nostalgia, taking it as a sound investment in one’s pop-culture equity, or writing it off as a de facto co-pay toward rock’s fast-failing status quo — a Paul McCartney show just seems . . . different, excusable, maybe even compulsory.

By: MICHAEL BRODEUR | August 10, 2009

The scene is now

What we can learn about Boston from the local winners
As newspapers cede arbiter status to random bloggers with Fios and afternoons off, the function of polls like our humble offering must change out of necessity. What once was a forecast is now more like a diagnostic — it's anthropology versus tastemakery.

By: MICHAEL BRODEUR | July 30, 2009

Yacht | See Mystery Lights

DFA (2009)
One reason DFA is the label of records people want at their party is because the folks there have a sense of humor — be it James Murphy's prolonged deadpan hipster-papa martyrdom, the Juan Maclean's unconcealed boner for shitty piano pre-sets, or the smile-while-you-dance extravagance of Hercules and Love Affair.

By: MICHAEL BRODEUR | July 29, 2009

Sound and vision

You can be old and like Micachu and the Shapes
When I hurried into a large tent to catch Micachu (a/k/a Mica Levi) and the Shapes at SxSW this past March, my back was killing me. I was in shit shape. This would normally be the point where the writer’s woes get turned around by the subject’s music. Far from it.

By: MICHAEL BRODEUR | July 16, 2009

Reaction Jackson

How to mourn a mess
There was Michael the living, breathing, singing performer and Jackson the commercial spectacle. We surrendered to the former, he to the latter.

By: MICHAEL BRODEUR | July 06, 2009

Bibio | Ambivalence Avenue

Warp (2009)
Since this new record by Wolverhampton's Stephen James Wilkinson (a/k/a Bibio) has done nothing but delight me, I'm going to honor the sentiments posted to his MySpace blog and spare him the f-word and all variants thereof.

By: MICHAEL BRODEUR | July 01, 2009

Fail better

Jóhann Jóhannsson explores the ruins of dreams
It's another gross, rainy afternoon in Boston, and I'm on the phone to Copenhagen with Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson talking about failure and despair. Great. Maybe I just had weird assumptions about Icelanders, but I expected we'd proceed on jollier terms.

By: MICHAEL BRODEUR | June 23, 2009

LA story

Little Joy's journey starts at home
Ask people around here why they'd never move to LA and "the traffic" will reliably top the list. That sure sounds reasonable, but check it out: by not languishing in belching cars and rotting the sky for hours at a time, by not submitting to the forced downtime imposed by cities like Los Angeles...we're missing out on a ton of good music.

By: MICHAEL BRODEUR | June 16, 2009

< prev 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | next >