Jim Viner’s Iowa City music resumé goes back a ways, at least to the 1990s, in the bands Head Candy, Bent Scepters and Brother Trucker. Jim Viner’s Incredible B3 Band is chock full of IC veterans, like the organists Radoslav Lorković and Nate Basinger. The band’s personnel overlaps with The Diplomats of Solid Sound, led by Doug Roberson, who also plays here.
Album reviews
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Album Review: Chris Vallillo — Oh Freedom!
Faced with the violence — both legal and extra-legal — inherent in the Jim Crow system, civil rights activists of the 1950s and 1960s forged a culture of strength and […]
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Album Review: Pieta Brown – Drifters
Pieta Brown Drifters www.pietabrown.com Pieta Brown and her band had a very productive four and a half days at Justin Vernon’s April Base Studios recording her 2014 album Paradise Outlaw. […]
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Album Review: Land of Blood and Sunshine – Lady and the Trance
Land of Blood and Sunshine Lady and the Trance www.cartoucherecords.com Lady and the Trance, the upcoming release from Marshalltown’s Land of Blood and Sunshine, is the kind of record that […]
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Album Review: Cedar County Cobras – Delta Avenue Juke Joint
Cedar County, Iowa is home of West Branch, Springdale, Clarence, Lowden and the Cedar County Cobras. Their debut album’s title, Delta Avenue Juke Joint, is an inside joke: Delta Ave. is a county road that connects nowhere to nowhere a few miles north-east of Cedar Bluff, where the album was recorded. It’s the kind of place where fun is, of necessity, homemade…
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Album Review: Holy White Hounds’ ‘Sparkle Sparkle’
The guys in Holy White Hounds have been kicking around the Des Moines/Ankeny area for a few years in other bands, but it was the 2013 reunion of high school bandmates Brenton Dean (vocals, guitar) and Ambrose Lupercal (bass) that started the path to their debut record, Sparkle Sparkle…
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Album Review: Hailey Whitters’ ‘Black Sheep’
Hailey Whitters Black Sheep www.haileywhitters.com I hesitated, at first, to review this album. I’m not generally a fan of country music, and I didn’t know if I could pull off […]
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Album Review: Dana T’s ‘tiny mind MASSIVE soul’
Popular music is a tug of war between artistic and commercial concerns, and at the center of it all lays genre. For an artist, genres have stylistic signifiers and limits. A great musician can make punk rock that is satisfying and original within those limits, but if he or she adds a sitar or using diminished 13th chords, it usually stops being punk rock.
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Album Review: Danny Dysentery—’My Fangs Are Wet’
Danny Dysentery My Fangs Are Wet dannydysentery.bandcamp.com For every rabid fanbase there is a genre of music, it seems. For example, there is a crossing of horror fan culture with […]
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Album Review: The Ills – Fuck this planet
Erika Ebola, Danny Dysentery, Molly Marburg, Tommy Tinnitus, Stella Salmonella; I think I’m sensing a theme here. This is definitely punk rock/hardocre straight out of the 1980s, reminiscent of the Circle Jerks, Plasmatics, and the Rezillos. One may well ask, does the world need more hardcore punk rock with track names you can’t say on the radio or TV?
Short answer: Yes. Longer answer: Punk rock at this point is beyond a sociological phenomenon of the past, and has become a vernacular folk tradition.
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Album Review: Broken Water – Wrought
Although Shawn Reed no longer lives in Iowa City, his label — Night People — has its heart here, at least partly-so. In an interview for Art of Iowa, Reed said that while “the label grew out of being into records, booking shows, inviting touring bands to play (in Iowa City),” it “doesn’t live any place in particular.”
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Album Review: Creeping Punk – Mirror Woods
Creeping Pink Mirror Woods (Castle Face Records) www.facebook.com/creepingpink Mirror Woods is the first full-length effort from Creeping Pink, the newest band on the Castle Face Records roster. Neither the slow […]
