Music Reviews

T’Bone is based in Chicago, but is made up of Iowa natives Leland Meiners (bass), Ed Bornstein (drums) and Pat McPartland (guitar), and their album Mount Trashmore was recorded in Iowa City at Luke Tweedy’s Flat Black Studio. Chicago, birthplace of seminal post rock bands like Tortoise and Gastr Del Sol, is an apt home for these guys, whose songs follow their own crooked paths, leaving pop song conventions far behind.

Questions of authenticity and the creative process have long been pressed on fans of modern music, especially electronic music. File sharing and digital manipulation change the collaborative process and force listeners to ask how important human playing, human authorship and human interaction are to creating what we call music. Is collaboration collaborative when it is […]

Fetal Pig Autopia fetalpig.bandcamp.com Jesus said “Behold the lilies of the field. They toil not, neither do they spin.” For some reason Fetal Pig reminds me of Jesus’ lilies. With a band history going back nearly 20 years, these guys do what they do not because it makes them rich and famous–because it hasn’t–but because […]

Rahlan Kay is the new hip-hop handle for Rowland Gibson, who has in the past been known as Genuyne, DNA and Testfyi. Rowland is a producer and MC from Cedar Rapids who has been a regular in the Iowa hip-hop scene for over ten years. He’s nothing if not persistent. There’s more than a few sketchy MCs around who are legends in their own minds, but Rowland’s different–he’s church folk, a family man and dead serious about his craft.

The Wheelers are a pan-Iowan band with members scattered between Iowa City and Ames. Other joint efforts between these two cities often result in heavy drinking, name calling and injuries and, while I can’t confirm that The Wheelers encounter a similar fate when they get together, the teetering energy here is very much the same.