Paul Cary’s last album Ghost Of A Man was a go-for-broke alley brawl of a record: It was sparsely arranged, emphasizing Cary’s voice and guitar. His newest album, Coyote, adds a full band that includes Russ Calderwood’s bass and Adam Penly’s greasy, distorted Farfisa filling much of the aural space left open on Ghost.
Album Reviews
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Album Reviews: Twins – Tomboys on Parade
My passion for music started to deepen when I discovered The Beatles in sixth grade. For the first time, I wanted to know everything about a band. This love of The Beatles opened the door for my appreciation of bands who were clearly influenced by the Fab Four. Often grouped under the genre of “power pop,” I was a sucker for bands like The Smithereens, Urge Overkill and Game Theory.
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Album Reviews: Flat Black Studios Compilation
Luke Tweedy, the recording engineer behind Flat Black Studios, had a good year in 2013. “More good bands writing good songs were recorded last year than any other single year,” Tweedy said. “Yet, almost none of [the songs] got released.” In an effort to share the songs he was still listening to “long after the band[s] walked away from the studio,” Tweedy decided to release a collection of the recordings as a vinyl compilation through his and Will Whitmore’s record label, Long Play Records.
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Album Reviews: Dan Bobek – Vibrating On Hi
On Facebook, Dan Bobek has been posting a sort of slow motion performance art piece: Awkward personal observations, videos of himself playing the song he wrote an hour ago and dispatches from the trenches of the life of an Iowa City musician. Vibrating On Hi is a side effect of Bobek’s relentless self-exposure, except that it’s put together more carefully than what bubbles up on Facebook.
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Album Review: Bedroom Shrine – No Déjà Vu
If you are a follower of the music website daytrotter.com, you have already been exposed to Johnnie Cluney’s illustrations, which give the site its signature pen-and-ink look. What you might not be aware of, however, is Cluney’s work as a musician with his band Bedroom Shrine. The group’s debut full-length album, No Déjà Vu, is a product of the Quad Cities’ tight-knit music community. No Déjà Vu is the first release for Iowa’s newest record label, Cartouche Records, run by Davenport’s Ragged Record…
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Album Reviews: Jordan Mayland and the Thermal Detonators – I Wrote It All Down
Jordan Mayland has an insane work ethic, that much is clear. The Ames-based musician has offered his talents to a huge array of bands: indie-pop acts like…
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Album Reviews – Lake Street Dive – Bad Self Portraits
Recently, buzz has been building around the band Lake Street Dive. It started with an unexpected appearance on the Colbert Report on Feb. 5, where Stephen Colbert asked the band if they were ready for the “Colbert Bump”—the reported spike in popularity guests and topics receive after being featured on the show.
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Album Reviews: Works by Matthew Davis, Sergio Leone
When Matthew Davis died in his sleep of an aneurysm in 2003, the loss to Iowa City was larger than the death of one man. His band Ten Grand — so named because, as rumor has it, a more affluent musical group paid them an undisclosed amount to give up their former name Vidablue — was on the verge of becoming a big thing outside our small…
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Album Reviews: The Surf Zombies – It’s a…THING!
The Surf Zombies are back with their fourth album, It’s A… THING!, which marks the second album featuring their current band lineup: Founding member Brook Hoover is on guitar along with Ian Williams from the Wheelers and the Blendours, also on guitar. There is also Tyler Russell on drums and Trevor Treiber from the Blendours on bass, replacing…
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Album Reviews: Muscle – My House is a Show
Kathleen Hanna, the singer for Bikini Kill and original Riot Grrrl, did something important around the time the women in Muscle were born: She stopped asking permission from men to define who she was. She was angry and confrontational and sexy and funny, and she rocked.
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Album Reviews: Death Ships – Turn of the Century EP
In interviews with R.E.M. around the time of their ‘92 album Automatic For The People, the band commented that it was difficult to write good uptempo…
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Album Reviews: Speakerwire Collins – The Boy Said My Name’s Johnny
Speakerwire Collins is Brian Boelman of the Miracles Of God and Iowa City’s most unpredictable guitarist, bassist and songwriter, Ed Gray. They’re the…
