85 Decibel Monks Pool Cues tackfu.com 85 Decibel Monks is the Iowa City-based duo of Tack-Fu and Grover Beats. Their newest release, Pool Cues, is a 29-track instrumental odyssey with the cool, light, jazz vibe of chilling with a martini at an upscale lounge or are relaxing on a yacht in Monaco. The third track, […]
Album reviews
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Album Reviews: Velcro Moxie – Restless
Velcro Moxie is a rock and roll band fronted by a remarkable voices of Jasmine Terrell and Nick Carney. They’ve become a live mainstay at the Yacht Club since getting together in 2011. If you live in Iowa City when a band plays the Yacht Club frequently, they get pigeonholed as one of “those” bands—a bit jammy, a bit hippy dippy—but that’s usually an unfair judgement, both of the bands and of Yacht Club.
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Album Reviews: The River Monks – Home is the House
If Sufjan Stevens ever decided to return to his 50-state project—an attempt at composing album-length tributes for each state—he would be wise to skip Iowa altogether. The River Monks have beat him to the punch with their new album, Home is the House, one of the most essential and distilled “Iowan” records in recent memory, complete with traditional instruments contrasted by progressive song structures. Songs address themes of nature, friends and family and have the kind of studio polish that humbly displays the hard work that the band’s six musicians must have poured into the album.
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Album Reviews: Giant Question Mark – The Qualbum
Giant Question Mark is a project by Alex Body and Joe Heuerman that grew out of a mutual affection for synths and drum machines. Since last December, they’ve existed as a live performance duo, though they occasionally uploaded raw, improvised tracks to Bandcamp as examples of their work. I found these pieces really entertaining and wanted to review them, but for the
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Album Review: Bonne Finken – Love Affairs
I have an ambivalent relationship with commercial pop. I got my first transistor radio in 1966, when we lived in San Jose, Calif., so my seminal experience of pop music was at the moment when Motown, The Beatles and psychedelic rock collided. The mainstream was a lot l
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Album Reviews: Eufórquestra – Fire
The jam band genre is often less focused on the style of music played by the band and more focused on the community the band has with its audience. These communities, which are typically built through extensive touring, allow bands like Eufórquestra to eschew traditional artist-label relationships for more direct, fan-to-artist connections.
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Album Reviews: The White Elephant – Cocaine Love Letter
Cocaine Love Letter was born while the band was taking some downtime. Rohr and bandmate Ron Coleman both ended up writing a bunch of acoustic demos during this time and decided to turn them into three albums, which will all eventually be released for free on their website…
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Album Reviews: Item 9 & The Mad Hatters – III
Item 9 & The Mad Hatters was originally a cover band called Old Style, but in 2010 they added lead vocalist Adam Maxwell to the mix and made the transition to original tunes. The time spent honing their chops playing a variety of musical genres in Old Style paid off and is highlighted in the band’s newest album, III, a funky stew of seemingly every rock and roll ingredient.
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Album Reviews: Paul Cary and The Small Scarys – Coyote
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.
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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.
