Techno originated in Belleville, Mich., and was invented by middle-class black teenagers with ties to Detroit. Techno brought together the influences of disco, James Brown and Parliament-Funkadelic and combined them with the paler European electronic styles of Kraftwerk and Giorgio Moroder, which embraced a dreamy futurism born out of comic books and science fiction paperbacks.
Album reviews
Posted inAlbum Reviews
Album Review: Peas and Carrot – Big Girl Shoes
When Iowa Public Radio asked Peas and Carrot lead singer and guitarist Audrey Robinson who her vocal influences were during a recent in-studio interview, she snapped back, “NOT Janis Joplin!” “Janis Joplin” is too often used as shorthand for any female singer who has a raw, bluesy edge, but Robinson’s sound is less hoarse belting and more dynamic rock and soul reminiscent of vocalists like Linda Perry, PJ Harvey and Brittany Howard of Alabama Shakes.
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Album Review: Unknown Component – Arbitrary Ambiguity
Keith Lynch (a.k.a. Unknown Component) doesn’t have a band—he produces his music at home and plays all the parts. He uses a group name, though it’s just him. And while he’s a guitar-playing singer-songwriter, his albums are full of electronic sounds.
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Album Review: The Great American Cattle Barons – Lavish Lies of the Holy Corpse
The Great American Cattle Barons is actually yet another ‘band’ instigated by Iowa City’s profligate purveyor of bummer rock, Samuel Locke Ward, this time…
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Album Review: Kelly Pardekooper – Milk in Sunshine
The musician credits of Kelly Pardekooper’s new album Milk in Sunshine is a who’s who of Eastern Iowa country, folk and blues legends including Bo Ramsey, Dave Zollo, Dave Moore, Pieta Brown and Radoslav Lorkovic. Milk in Sunshine is a massive 24-song CD and/or vinyl LP package encompassing 10 new songs with a bonus 16-song “greatest hits” of Kelly Pardekooper.
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Album Review: Pieta Brown – Paradise Outlaw
During her show at CSPS in October 2013, Pieta Brown mentioned that she was working on her next album at Justin Vernon’s April Base studios in Fall Creek, Wis. As a fan of Vernon—better known as the frontman and songwriter of Bon Iver—I was anxious to hear the results.
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Album Review: Bull Black Nova – Don’t Fall Away
Don’t Fall Away is an album of ambitious art-pop songs with a pretty broad palette of sounds and styles. It’s at least partially home-recorded by A. J. Worden, the man behind Bull Black Nova, though Brook Hoover, of the Surf Zombies, gets an engineering credit as well. No matter the means of production, this is a well-recorded, dynamically dramatic album. It really is true that these days all you need is a computer, a decent microphone or two and good ideas.
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Album Review: Jack Lion — JAC EP
It seemed that after Slip Silo vocalist and guitarist Matt Logan split the Midwest and his band to take an opportunity on the West Coast, the remainder of the band was rudderless. In a March 2013 interview with Little Village he said that he hoped they’d be able to continue on the mission of connecting and tapping into a “transcendent and universal creativity source” without him.
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Album Review: The Sapwoods – Peaks and Valleys
Iowa City band The Sapwoods are back with their second album titled Peaks and Valleys. While the lineup in the band has changed since their 2012 release Electric Glow, the core of Justin Swafford (vocals and guitar) and David Suchan (lead guitar) remains the same. Joining Swafford and Suchan are Brian Speer on bass, Derrick Cook on drums and Miranda Peyton on keys, vocals and guitar.
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Album Review: Alex Body – Aquarian Nightmare
Alex Body — of Twelve Canons, Miracles of God, Giant Question Mark, Shitty Wizard — has released three solo albums, of which Aquarian Nightmare is the most recent. Since 2011′s Cutting Down Camelot, Body has waded further into the electronic end of the psych-pop swamp. This album’s sound is a thick mixture of drum machines and analog synths, and he is more confident of his voice, cutting back a bit on the slapback echo and reverb
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Album Review: The Main Sequence – Self-Titled LP
Ambient music generally has no narrative, no frontman and sometimes no recognizable foreground. This is a genre where practitioners may outnumber the total audience, at least in the U.S. where Americans like celebrity, attitude and a human focal point in their music. Ambient music doesn’t just lack those things, it’s an active rejection of them…
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Album Reviews: Doll Food – Marrow Deep
Doll Food, a former Iowa City improvisational noise duo (now based out of Chicago), has been crafting zonked-out and eerie soundscapes for about a year now. Brandon Volz and vocalist Bri LaPelusa’s composing process is deceptively simple: Each song begins with LaPelusa layering vocal loops into a Julianna Barwick-esque, one-woman chorus, followed by Volz creating a decaying soun
