1. Bankrupt!, Phoenix
2.Live at Bull Moose, Mumford & Sons
3. Lawn Boy, Phish
4. Blind Melon/Sipping Time EP, Blind Melon
5. Love Has Come For You, Steve Martin & Edie Brickell
6. Boys & Girls, Alabama Shakes
7. Low Highway, Steve Earle & the Dukes
8. Live, Built to Spill
9. Reincarnated, Snoop Lion
10. The Terror, Flaming Lips
11. Ghost on Ghost, Iron & Wine
12. Rare Cuts & Oddities, The Grateful Dead
13. Side by Side: Skulls, Misfits & The Lemonheads
14. This River, JJ Grey & Mofro
15. Mosquito, Yeah Yeah Yeahs
16. 7 Minutes in Heaven, Pornography
17. Cold Fact, Rodriguez
18. Entertainment, Phoenix
19. Music is You: A Tribute to John Denver, Various Artists
20. Venomous Rat Regeneration Vendor, Rob Zombie
NEW RELEASE OF THE WEEK: PHOENIX GOES 'BANKRUPT!'
PREVIEW/BUY THE CD HERE
PREVIEW/BUY THE VINYL HERE
Bankrupt!, the follow up to 2009’s Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, will sound familiar to the band’s fans from the off, but also represents the first significant aesthetic shift in their oeuvre. Opening track and lead single “Entertainment” has the familiar rolling drums and Thomas Mars’ distinctively soaring vocals that caused the likes of “1901” and “Too Young” to endear themselves to every Sofia Coppola fan’s heart, but it also sets the tone for the album with a rolling surf of synths blurring out the minimalist guitars.
Over the course of the album it’s like the guitars have been washed out to sea never to return, dying like this analogy. Instead it’s all keyboards to the fore, their lightness lifting the album on to a wave of euphoria that gives Mars’ vocals a dreamlike quality; this is less the Williamsburg house party of previous albums, instead a festival in a trance. The “My Girls”-esque title track is a particular highlight, bubbling and frothing unhurried towards a crescendo that never comes, playful misdirection that sees the song slide away as unobtrusively as it arrived. OnBankrupt! Phoenix sounds like a band imposing self-restrictions of minimalism and then exploring every tiny niche found, from the soulful ’70s funk of “Drakkar Noir” to the heartbroken floatiness of “The Real Thing.”
Perhaps the most telling point is that this album bears closest resemblance to Bowie’s Let’s Dance; an artist inextricably linked with European music. Whether this is coincidence or not, Bankrupt! suggests that the rest of the world has a lot of catching up to do. -Under the Radar
STEVE MARTIN & EDIE BRICKELL 'LOVE HAS COME FOR YOU' & OTHER NEW CD RECOMMENDATIONS
PREVIEW/BUY THE CD HERE
PREVIEW/BUY THE VINYL HERE
Did Steve Martin rock his signature arrow-through-the-head prop at these bluegrass-y sessions? Hard to tell; except for unfussy harmonies, he expresses himself only via his stately, joyous banjo-plunking. The star is Edie Brickell, the hippie-pop one-hit wonder (and Mrs. Paul Simon), whose sassy vocals feel down-home but all her own. The songs tap folk tradition without getting stuck in it; they’re full of struggling lovers, an ’84 Ford, a baby in a suitcase and some memorable melodies. With help from guitar legend Waddy Wachtel and others, these two make a dandy duo. Hey, Mumford & Sons: Need an opening act? –Rolling Stone
RECORD EXCHANGE TOP 20 SELLERS (WEEK ENDING APRIL 14, 2013)
1. Wakin’ on a Pretty Daze, Kurt Vile
2. Stories Don’t End, Dawes
3. Outlaw Gentlemen & Shady Ladies, Volbeat
4. Give Up (10th Anniversary Edition), Postal Service
5. Music is You: A Tribute to John Denver, Various Artists
6. Pool Party, Ponderosa
7. Shaking the Habitual, The Knife
8. Tooth & Nail, Billy Bragg
9. The Heist, Macklemore & Ryan Lewis
10. Searching for Sugarman, Soundtrack
11. Some Nights, Fun.
12. The Beast In Its Tracks, Josh Ritter
13. Overgrown, James Blake
14. Cold Fact, Rodriguez
15. Comedown Machine, The Strokes
16. Wolf, Tyler the Creator
17. The Next Day, David Bowie
18. Old Yellow Moon, Emmylou Harris & Rodney Crowell
19. Born To Die, Lana Del Rey
20. Victim of Love, Charles Bradley
PONDEROSA IN-STORE WEDNESDAY, APRIL 10 — ONLY SHOW IN TOWN!
Ponderosa will perform live at The Record Exchange (1105 W. Idaho St., Downtown Boise) at 6 p.m. Wednesday, April 10 — this is the band’s ONLY SHOW IN TOWN! This free, all-ages Record Exchange in-store is sponsored in part by Boise Weekly. RSVP HERE.
ABOUT PONDEROSA
In the low light of the hut the old man sat quietly puffing on his mapacho. “You must disengage from your…continuity,” he said, referring I’m sure to my earbuds, which, with apologies, I cranked. As I tapped the last drop out of the clay cup and laid back on the ragged foam mat I saw that the old man’s face was no longer his, but a hawk’s. The spirit-world comes on like that.
The music I came to see with my third eye, Ponderosa’s Pool Party, started with a voice, a silver highlonesome in a mist (or maybe the mist was the voice), an electric guitar that identified itself (verbally, and I’m translating here) as He-who-makes-things-sprout, then a convergence at something analogous to a rain dance, as if conducted (in lapis lazuli) by Keith Moon. Pianos and guitars and harmonies breathed into existence tetrahedrons, Spanish friars, bird-lions, machine elves, Quetzacotl, so forth, and landscapes, always the sweeping, rolling variety. No point going on about what the music looks like. To paraphrase the giant, blazing eye that cries honey, you must see for yourself.
Hearing Ponderosa’s previous album for the first time was a no less illuminating experience if a very different one, involving a trampoline, two bottles of rye, and a sack of possum. Another facet of Ponderosa, another method to ascertain its nature. That album, Moonlight Revival, belongs in the Southern rock canon as much as anything by the Crowes or Little Feat, but more crucial is that with it Ponderosa delivered the first successful fusion of straight Southern rock and Revolver-era Beatles, utterly seamless and genetically sound, not a Frankenstein. This is the musical equivalent of mapping the genome, drunk, using only a monocle. Impossible, yet Ponderosa demonstrated that “a thing that cannot be done can be accomplished by not-doing it.” And because that sounded more conclusively relevant when it was told to me by a stag with no mouth, let’s add that Ponderosa’s clear m.o. is following its bliss.