MIKAEL WOOD

Motörhead

MIKAEL WOOD — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 20:19:19 GMT

Motörizer | Steamhammer/SPV
In these unsettling times of geopolitical instability around the globe and economic chaos here at home, it’s nice to know that we can depend on Motörhead.

Sugarland

MIKAEL WOOD — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 22:11:58 GMT

Love on the Inside | Mercury Nashville
Jennifer Nettles and Kristian Bush aren’t afraid to get a little goofy for the sake of a laugh.

Mike Gordon

MIKAEL WOOD — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 21:10:20 GMT

The Green Sparrow | Rounder
Phish phans biding their time for the jam band’s all-but-confirmed reunion should find plenty to occupy themselves with on this second solo album by bassist Mike Gordon.

John Mellencamp | Life Death Love and Freedom

MIKAEL WOOD — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 17:53:57 GMT

Hear Music
The arrangements are sparse compared with those of Mellencamp’s pop hits — many don’t even allow drums — but they’re rich with textural detail.

Jenny Scheinman

MIKAEL WOOD — Tue, 27 May 2008 15:02:37 GMT

Koch
You might recognize Jenny Scheinman’s name from the liner notes of one of the many high-profile releases on which she’s appeared as a jazz violinist.

Carolina Liar

MIKAEL WOOD — Tue, 20 May 2008 14:46:21 GMT

Coming to Terms | Atlantic
Highly recommended to those unafraid of late-period Bon Jovi.

Phil Stacey

MIKAEL WOOD — Tue, 06 May 2008 19:37:44 GMT

Lyric Street
No coincidence that Phil Stacey was interesting on Idol only when he sang songs that emphasized his creepiness — “Every Breath You Take,” for instance.

Flight of the Concords

MIKAEL WOOD — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 18:56:55 GMT

Sub Pop
Given my choice of late-night HBO comedy series about foul-mouthed acoustic duos with inflated senses of self-importance, I’ll take Tenacious D over Flight of the Conchords every time.

Better than Madonna

MIKAEL WOOD — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 21:27:21 GMT

Pop stars with product to move
Everybody dug Confessions on a Dance Floor , but I’m one of approximately 12 people who liked American Life , Madonna’s weirdly militant 2003 disc.

Tapes N' Tapes

MIKAEL WOOD — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 20:25:40 GMT

Walk It Off | XL
Last time we heard from this young Minneapolis quartet — and if you spend any time on the Internet, you heard a lot — the story had little to do with music.

Tristan Prettyman

MIKAEL WOOD — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 15:01:08 GMT

Hello | Virgin
This sophomore set by San Diego–based Tristan Prettyman doesn’t warrant its statement-making title.

Solo shot

MIKAEL WOOD — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 14:03:39 GMT

Gary Louris leaves the Jayhawks behind
Gary Louris had no grand designs for the beginning of his solo career.

ALIVE AND WELL Louris’s desire to make music didn’t end with his old band.

Gary Louris had no grand designs for the beginning of his solo career. “The Jayhawks just seemed to have run their course,” he says of the long-running Minneapolis-based alt-country band he formed with Mark Olson in 1985. Olson left the group following 1995’s Tomorrow the Green Grass, but Louris continued recording and touring with the Jayhawks for another decade; the band’s last studio disc, Rainy Day Music, came out in 2003. “We were running a bit on fumes,” he admits. “Not in terms of popularity or anything, but in terms of inspiration. It seems like there’s a certain lifespan for a band, and ours was longer than most.” What hadn’t run its course was Louris’s desire to keep making music. “So I just decided to use my own name.”

Louris’s new Vagabonds (Rykodisc) sounds like the child of such low-key circumstances, a warm set of cozy folk-rock jams that won’t shock Jayhawks fans. He recorded the CD in LA: Chris Robinson of the Black Crowes produced (with help from Thom Monahan, a former Pernice Brother who’s helmed records by Devendra Banhart and Brightblack Morning Light), members of the Black Crowes and San Francisco’s Vetiver serve as the backing band, and Susanna Hoffs, Johnathan Rice, the Chapin Sisters, and Rilo Kiley frontwoman Jenny Lewis all contribute backing vocals as the so-called Laurel Canyon Family Choir.

Louris says Vagabonds had a couple of “false starts” in his basement studio in Minneapolis. “I felt a little bit unsure about what I was doing. I needed someone to help me navigate the forest, to figure out which songs to do and how to do them.” He’d known Robinson since 1991. “We’re good friends and we think a lot alike. Even though we’re different on the outside, we come from the same place inside.”

On Louris’s current tour, which hits the Somerville Theatre Tuesday, Vetiver will be his backing band. (Pedal-steel player Eric Heywood, on loan from Ray LaMontagne’s group, is also part of the ensemble.) Louris says he likes the idea of “a guy hooking up with a band. It’s not like throwing five strangers in a room and you all have to figure out where you fit in.”

Morcheeba

MIKAEL WOOD — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 17:29:05 GMT

Dive Deep | Ultra
He’s Morcheeba’s best bet for avoiding a trip to snoozytown.

Xiu Xiu

MIKAEL WOOD — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 19:26:05 GMT

Women as Lovers | Kill Rock Stars
Jamie Stewart has been releasing recordings at such a steady clip since 2002 that you might expect him to have run out of new ways to provoke discomfort.

Be Your Own Pet

MIKAEL WOOD — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 14:23:12 GMT

Get Awkward | Ecstatic Peace/Universal
Blonde-bombshell frontwoman Jemina Pearl and her mates haven’t exactly reached maturity.

Jaymay

MIKAEL WOOD — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 22:45:54 GMT

Autumn Fallin' | Blue Note
“Where’s my morning coffee?”, Jaymay wonders in “Sea Green, See Blue,” a cut from the New York–based singer-songwriter’s major-label debut.

Allison Moorer

MIKAEL WOOD — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 22:17:08 GMT

Mockingbird | New Line
Working with producer Buddy Miller, Moorer takes an approach opposite to Lynne’s on the stripped-down Lovin’ , giving each track its own distinct personality.

O, Canada!

MIKAEL WOOD — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 20:28:44 GMT

Cowboy Junkies, k.d. lang, and Kathleen Edwards are not hockey pucks
You’d be forgiven for assuming that nothing’s been going on in Canada for the last few years beyond the interconnected shenanigans of that country’s indie-rock elite.

SPACED OUT AND SLOWED DOWN: Cowboy Junkies’ signature sound is still one of the sexiest in alt-country.

Provided you get your music news from newspapers or magazines or Web sites — really, from anywhere but the mouth of someone who lives there — you’d be forgiven for assuming that nothing’s been going on in Canada for the last few years beyond the interconnected shenanigans of that country’s indie-rock elite. Arcade Fire, Feist, the Dears — they’ve all done an excellent job of soaking up whatever attention the rest of the world has deemed appropriate to lavish on the Great White North. But they’re not the end of the story, as witness a handful of new albums by rootsy Canadian artists who — believe it or not — don’t spend their nights and weekends playing in Broken Social Scene.

That said, a couple of moonlighters do show up on Trinity Revisited (Latent/Warner Music Canada), a handsome CD-DVD package from Cowboy Junkies, one of Canada’s longest-running rock acts. The Junkies’ longevity is actually the point of Trinity Revisited: it celebrates the 20th anniversary of the Ontario outfit’s 1988 breakthrough, The Trinity Session, which they recorded around a single microphone inside downtown Toronto’s Church of the Holy Trinity.

To make Revisited, the Junkies regathered at Holy Trinity along with a film crew and some high-profile friends — Natalie Merchant, Ryan Adams, and Vic Chesnutt — and recorded themselves playing the album’s material (this time with more than one microphone). The idea, as they explain in a brief documentary included on the DVD, was to see what’s happened to the music over the past two decades.

The answer? Not a whole heck of a lot. The Junkies rose to alt-rock renown by doing pretty much what their band name implied: slowing down and spacing out country music till it resembled the sound a roadhouse jukebox might emit if it were coming down from a heroin high. (This penchant for straight-shooting descriptions — pardon the pun — caught on among the group’s latter-day successors; see also Codeine and Low.) And though they’ve become more sophisticated songwriters — about half of TheTrinity Session consists of covers, among them Hank Williams’s “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” and “Sweet Jane” by the Velvet Underground — the Junkies haven’t wavered from that mission since the late ’80s.

Bell X1

MIKAEL WOOD — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 15:41:24 GMT

Flock | Yep Roc
Remember when Snow Patrol were huge in the UK but only a college-radio curio here?

British Sea Power

MIKAEL WOOD — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 17:01:49 GMT

Do You Like Rock Music? | Rough Trade
British Sea Power’s answer to the question posed in the title of their third album is a definite yes.