Tag Archives: music

SUSS’s Heat Haze

Heat Haze picks up where the New York ambient country band SUSS left off with their previous offering, Night Suite left off. That five-song EP, you’ll recall, dropped unexpectedly in October 2021. It took the listener on a nighttime journey … Continue reading

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Evan J Cartwright’s bit by bit

Evan J Cartwright is a Toronto-based musical polymath who is best known as the go-to drummer and collaborator for a variety of top-notch indie acts, the best known of them being The Weather Station. For his first full-length release under … Continue reading

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Club d’Elf’s You Never Know

So I guess now I’m a fan of dub? Or at least of some of its hybrids in world music, like the Turkish psychedelic dub of Baba Zula, the American Southwestern dub experiments of Calexico, and now this world-dub-jazz hybrid … Continue reading

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Laurel Premo’s Golden Loam

Solo guitar albums can be daunting to listen to and even moreso to review. Especially if you’re not a guitar player yourself and don’t have the knowledge to pick out what’s unique about the guitarist’s style, or the vocabulary to … Continue reading

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Ben Yagoda’s The B-Side: The Death of Tin Pan Alley and the Rebirth of the Great American Song

“They don’t write songs like that anymore!” You’ve probably said that about some song from your own youth or young adult years, just as your parents and maybe even grandparents said about their old favorites. Every generation says this about … Continue reading

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Almog Sharvit’s Get Up or Cry

Musicians are not always the most articulate persons when it comes to describing their own music. It looks to me like bassist Almog Sharvit is the exception. Because when he refers to the music on his debut leader date Get … Continue reading

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Ryan Dugré’s Three Rivers

Brooklyn guitarist Ryan Dugré did an exercise in which he wrote a song a day in January 2019, as a way to move himself out of his usual songwriting comfort zone. The idea was to just get something down, an … Continue reading

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Frode Haltli Avant Folk’s St. Morten

Everything new is old again for the holiday season of 2020. Everyone in the English speaking world knows the song “The Twelve Days Of Christmas,” right? Well, Norwegian accordionist Frode Haltli and his Avant Folk ensemble have a treat for … Continue reading

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Gary’s favorite jazz and experimental music of 2020

A lot of my absolute favorite music of 2020 was instrumental: jazz and especially various kinds of experimental music. Some of it I reviewed here at GMR, some I didn’t. Here’s a look at 10 of my favorites in this … Continue reading

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Gary’s favorite ‘world music’ of 2020

This sort of exercise serves to point up one of the problems with broad genres like “world music.” It’s reductive and inaccurate and Western-centric, and you end up with some strange companions. However, I listened to lots of music from … Continue reading

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