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
Local album reviews
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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
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Album Review: 85 Decibel Monks – Pool Cues
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, […]
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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.
