It felt like the ’90s all over again during R.E.M.’s blistering performance at Berkeley’s Greek Theatre. Modest Mouse and The National opened for the alt-rock elder statesmen. Kyle Lemmon reviews.
ReviewsAuthor Kyle Lemmon
The Explorers Club – Freedom Wind
You’ve got to applaud The Explorers Club for being so brave with their love of music – a situation their hero knows all about.
Destroyer / Devon Williams – The Independent, San Francisco, CA, 21/5/2008
Like a microcosm of Bejar’s own songwriting the San Francisco concert had its own share of cheerless pitfalls and buoyant experiments.
Islands – Arm’s Way
Arm’s Way is collection of sometimes grievous pop tunes that continue Thorburn’s fixation with the dark corners of his/our psyche – rocks he turned over with glee for the Unicorns and Islands’ first release.
Jamie Lidell – Jim
For Jamie Lidell’s third album Kyle Lemmon witnesses the consummate performer step out from behind his burnished red curtain of electronics to do what he’s always done best – sing original material with the confident gait of all the soul/funk singers he emulates.
Sebadoh – Bubble and Scrape (Deluxe Edition)
After III’s lo-fi bliss balance, the classic trio that jettisoned from Lou Barlow and Eric Gaffney’s tape swapping ‘zinester ’80s culture pushed further into oblivion. Kyle Lemmon reviews the 15th anniversary indie rock juggernaut’s reissue from Domino.
Animal Collective – Water Curses EP
The New York City-based band Animal Collective have always retained a certain affinity towards watery aural theatrics since their inception in the the Baltimore noise scene. The title song on their companion EP to last year’s sticky masterpiece, Strawberry Jam, aims to fill in any cracks in the band’s frenetic and ever-shifting experimental pastiche with Avey Tare’s (David Portner) gooey vocals.
El Perro del Mar – From the Valley to the Stars
Kyle Lemmon reviews El Perro del Mar’s sophomore album but feels it spends more time at the bottom of the valley rather than the height of the stars.
Four Tet – Ringer EP
Ringer can be viewed in a variety of ways – most notably as a stop-gap album/EP considering its’ running time (just over 30 minutes) and the slim helping of percussive laptop techno that listeners get after the favorable chart-topper, 2005′s Everything Ecstatic. Kyle Lemmon reviews.
Man Man – Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, 23/04/08
Man Man bring their sweaty and bearded brand of live music mayhem to San Francisco’s Great American Music Hall. Kyle Lemmon assessed the carnage.
M83 – Saturdays = Youth
Not unlike a teenager grasping with the impending death of their childhood, Saturdays=Youth celebrates our formative years as much as it tries to numb us to the metastasizing reality that the hopeful world of adolescence is all too aware it soon will only be able to remember a facsimile of the real sublime thing. Kyle Lemmon reviews.
