Kevchino.com - Current Reviews

The Shins - Port of Morrow

Tue, 08 May 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Columbia | 2012 | Album
Reviewed By: justin Patch
Review Date: 5/8/2012
Rating (out of 10): 8 - Great.

What is good pop? Can it even exist, or is it a conceptual and structural impossibility? After all, isn’t pop, by nature, ephemeral, temporary, and fleeting? It’s a conundrum that haunts even the most astute critics as we sleep. Can something that is so unabashedly crafted to please the ears of the masses actually be, dare I say, good? And, perhaps more to the point, will it still be as pleasing to the ears in a few months or years? If it is, is it still pop? Popular music, by definition, is hinged on mass taste, something that appeals to the fickle desires of the many, not the discerning palates of connoisseurs. It is not intended to be transcendent, ethereal, and timeless; it is brought forth by the brutally inhabited moment, lives and di... [read full review]

Lee Ranaldo - Between the Times and the Tide

Mon, 07 May 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Matador | 2012 | Album
Reviewed By: Erick Mertz
Review Date: 5/7/2012
Rating (out of 10): 8 - Great.

There is something surreptitious in listening to indie rock. Still. However overblown, its heart remains forged of concrete, the rough textures colored with spray paint. Perhaps no one exemplifies that gritty aesthetic better than Lee Ranaldo. The riffs on Ranaldo’s album Between the Time and the Tide spill over with a raw, bristling energy. They are his guitar signatures, on vibrant display in the art/punk track “Fire Island (Phases)” that will surely please his purist following. “Off the Wall” is a classic, fast tempo, no holds barred, with earnest, almost meaningless lyrics. New to Ranaldo? Although he is a renowned poet, words are hardly the point. Anyone who has followed the New York City rocker’s thirty-year career know... [read full review]

Ceremony - Zoo

Thu, 03 May 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Matador | 2012 | Album
Reviewed By: Geary Kaczorowski
Review Date: 5/3/2012
Rating (out of 10): 9 - Simply Amazing.

Like a welcoming blast of punk air circa 1977, Ceremony crunch the tunes on their new album, Zoo, with vocal bravado courtesy of Ross Farrar and hard-charging guitars from Ryan Mattos and Anthony Anzaldo. The songs “World Blue” and “Adult” could have easily come straight out of the Sex Pistols songbook. They must have been channeling Steve Jones because that’s all I could think of when listening to the album. Farrar may not have the snarl of Johnny Rotten, but his powerful delivery more than makes up for the lack of British sneering. This Bay Area band has been able to hone their sound from the cacophony of their earlier releases into a completely cohesive slab of melodic punk angst. Even when they reach back to their dissonant past,... [read full review]

Grimes - Visions

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 00:00:00 GMT

4AD | 2012 | Album
Reviewed By: Katherine Baltrush
Review Date: 4/25/2012
Rating (out of 10): 7 - Very enjoyable.

Claire Boucher has hit the indie/digital music world like a tidal wave in the last two years, releasing three records and rising in status both as a DJ and a producer. Over that short period, she has begun to develop a unique voice as a songwriter, and has become the poster-girl of so-called “post-Internet” pop music. Visions contains Grimes’s most fully realized and polished music to date. Both musically and lyrically, the attempt to balance the digital world with human interactions, seeking reality in both, dominates the world of the record. The first several tracks drop us into the middle of a machine world, created with artificial, even cheap-sounding synths and heavy doses of reverb on her vocals. They sound as if neon-color... [read full review]

Laura Gibson - La Grande

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Barsuk | 2012 | Album
Reviewed By: Amelia Mason
Review Date: 4/19/2012
Rating (out of 10): 8 - Great.

The imagery in Laura Gibson’s La Grande is that of an American road trip, all dusty highways and silver moons and washed-out photographs. Yet the effect of this modest ten-track album, which clocks in at just thirty-five minutes, is more like an evening spent at home listening to old records. Gibson, who sings with the yearning, round-syllabled quality of Billie Holiday, reaches back through faded stacks of vinyl for everything from chain gang rhythms to surf rock guitars to ragtime piano. But La Grande is not so much a grab bag of musical nostalgia as it is the dream you would have after the turntable lulled you to sleep—eerily familiar, yet a world unto itself. La Grande is as much a product of digital mastery as i... [read full review]

Mr. Gnome - Madness In Miniature

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 00:00:00 GMT

El Marko Records | 2011 | Album
Reviewed By: Jaime Hypes
Review Date: 4/17/2012
Rating (out of 10): 8 - Great.

This two-piece husband-and-wife band is the best thing to come out of Cleveland, Ohio, in quite a long time. With their dreamy, beat-driven, urgent sounds, Mr. Gnome hit all the right notes on their third full-length album, Madness in Miniature. Although they have been sadly unnoticed for the most part, that only means they give everything they have in order to be heard. It is difficult to classify Mr. Gnome as fitting into one niche genre of music, falling somewhere between the folk-punk stylings of Tegan and Sara, the quite angst of Cat Power, and the dreamy electronics of Bat for Lashes. However, even given their inability to be neatly labeled, what they deliver is 100 percent clear: a balance between quiet apathy and not back... [read full review]

Air - Le Voyage Dans la Lune

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Astralwerks | 2012 | Album
Reviewed By: Meredith Webb
Review Date: 4/16/2012
Rating (out of 10): 8 - Great.

Amour, imagination, rêve (love, imagination, dream). This is the backronym Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoît Dunckel constructed to form Air in 1995. Since then the duo from Versailles have been delighting us with just that—albums full of love and great imagination that take us into dreamlike states and beyond. The very same can be said in regard to their latest work, Le Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon). A celestial work with twinkling synthesizers, heavenly harmonies and spacey computer tones, Le Voyage dans la Lune is the definitive soundtrack to any space voyage. The slow, heavy tom-toms and blasts of brass in “Astronomic Club” serve nicely as an opening track, giving a sexy yet sinister feel as rocket ship captains ... [read full review]

Tasseomancy - Ulalume

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Out of This Spark | 2011 | Album
Reviewed By: Meredith Webb
Review Date: 4/10/2012
Rating (out of 10): 7 - Very enjoyable.

I sat down to review Tasseomancy’s latest effort, Ulalume, alone in my house at night. Possibly a questionable idea. A melodic and beautifully haunting epic, the album could almost double as the soundtrack to a weird, twisted psycho-thriller, perhaps set in an abandoned mental hospital or ancient graveyard, or a once enchanted forest now taken over by the Dark Lord. Formerly known as Ghost Bees, Tasseomancy consists of Canadian twins Sari and Romy Lightman. Ulalume is their second full-length release and tends to move on from their earlier, more acoustic-based arrangements into experimental, ambient, and brooding tones laden with the sisters’ uniquely sweet and harmonic vocals (not unlike those of Karen O or perhaps fellow ... [read full review]

The Mark Lanegan Band - Blues Funeral

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 00:00:00 GMT

4AD | 2012 | Album
Reviewed By: Meredith Webb
Review Date: 4/9/2012
Rating (out of 10): 3 - Gathering dust.

Blues Funeral is the latest album to hit the airwaves from the Mark Lanegan Band. His seventh release, and first release of new material in eight years, it would make you think he couldn’t go wrong. But alas, you’d be wrong. Unlike its title suggests, it lacks any semblance of what is generally considered blues, unless the actual death of blues is what he was going for (hence the funeral). Lanegan’s deep, sultry, smoky vocals are the only thing that holds the album together, along with the one standout track, “The Gravedigger’s Song,” which opens the album with a gritty, heavy bass line, eerie guitars, and spooky synthesizers—a walk of the damned, if you will. After this, the album falls apart like a decomposing corpse. “Riot In M... [read full review]