Tag: Eels

Like light glinting off a distant wave, La Luz bring you a realm of possibilities.

We’re starting out with new music from Beatsteaks, who are taking on the Fun Boy Three’s “The Lunatics (Have Taken Over The Asylum)” for our opener. Tonight’s show featured both Molecular Steve and Delicate Steve, both of whom have new albums out, so I expect another couple of Steve-heavy shows in the future.

Thick Paint has a sound you just want to slather and spread on.

There’s a whole new album from Wreckless Eric, a whole album, but tonight’s selection resonates for the simple fact that this is the third reference to the radium girls I’ve heard this week, all from very different sources. As we say around these parts, it’s a real plate ‘o shrimp. Also worth noting tonight is n-th track from the Bug Club’s Rare Birds album, which has so many good songs on it you’ll be hearing from them for months to come, and that’s even with not playing the ones with bad words.

The voice of your conscience is a very close match to the one you hear coming from Grandaddy.

I meant to write the notes for this show sooner than a month after the fact, but travel plans got in the way and here I am struggling for an intro. I can tell you that hearing Sparklehorse take on Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians’ “Listening to the Higsons” for the first time, mere weeks ago, felt like someone became obsessed with the same cassette as I did thirty years ago, but actually got around to letting the hen out.

When I was younger, still developing my musical tastes, in an era where the Beatles were closer to those days than Nirvana are to these, I hated on Yoko. It's what we all did. The older me, like Stephin Merritt and the many other luminaries on Ocean Child: Songs of Yoko Ono, appreciates the inexpressible beauty and uncompromising nature of her art.

Shane McGowan was a true Irish poet, and although Cat Power delivers the classic track from the Pogues in a voice very different from the original whiskey-and-gravel, the song's deep inner character is unchanged.

Sometimes it takes a while for an album to be recognized as a classic, sometimes the shock of recognition is instant and universal. This is the case for Spoon and their latest release, Lucifer on the Sofa, which showcases much of what has made the band a constant source of solid material, but in a concentrated way that will make you start all over as soon as you hit the end.

Hatfield’s relentless output is given some inventive production, and I have to pause to carefully listen. There’s a lot to unpack, sonically and lyrically, and it refuses to fade into the background.