Aquarium Drunkard

M. Ward’s delicate and brittle compositions grow on me a little more with each listen. I first heard Ward three years ago opening for My Morning Jacket at a club with terrible sound in Hollywood. No matter, Ward’s lone acoustic and unconventional voice transcended the shitty hall and left my friends and I asking who […]

Riding the momentum of last year’s album Nobody’s Darlings and the honestly of the bare-boned, band-on-the-road-documentary Dreaming In America, Lucero is back with possibly their strongest and most consistent listen yet. Produced by David Lowery in his Virginia studio, Rebels, Rogues & Sworn Brothers finds the Lucero camp in full-on Rock mode. Imagine the past […]

Over beers earlier this summer at Athfest, team clermont’s Lucas Jensen casually mentioned that The Theatre Fire’s Everybody Has A Darkside album was his favorite release of ‘06. I was immediately intrigued as: a) we share similar tastes b) I had never heard of the Fort Worth band, and c) it was only mid-June. Now, […]

Hitting their stride (and the record-buying public) with not one, but two, albums this year is Brooklyn’s Oakley Hall. The latter of the two, Gypsum Strings, sees the psych-country-rock monsters burning through another set of experimental gothica, beginning with the shit-hot guitar lead on the album’s opener “Confidence Man.” Continuing in the same vein as […]

Is it still necessary to mention how prolific Jason Molina is, or has that ground been pretty much covered? Like Will Oldham and Robert Pollard before him, Molina is back in two separate studio incarnations available late Summer and early Autumn. Recording his second full-length with his Crazyhorse-style band Magnolia Electric Co., Molina also finds […]

And….we’re back. My apologies for the slight delay in getting this week’s podcast up and running. The following is last week’s broadcast recorded live in the Little Radio studio. I can’t tell you how much better it is doing these shows with a real mic/mixer/fader, etc. The computer got the job done, but it’s not […]

Last week after hosting Little Radio’s Aquarium Drunkard Show, I stuck around for the first half of the The Garden Fence of Sound show which directly follows mine. Regular host Dave Newton was out, but his fill-in played some great stuff — including this track. It turns out I missed out on 14 Iced Bears […]

I am loving all this return-to-the-rawk shit that has been coming out of indie-land the past couple of years. It’s like everyone put down their Joy Division and Television albums for awhile and started spinning their cool uncle’s old vinyl from the late ’70s.

The latest record from this camp to grace my desk is […]

A sultry Billie Holiday with an East Texas drawl? Soul-Jazz with a Country-politan lilt? Maybe, but the quality and craft of Jolie Holland’s third full-length, Springtime Can Kill You, is beyond any convenient comparison. Like her previous albums (and brief stint with The Be-Good Tanyas), Holland’s bouillabaisse of traditional American music defies easy pigeonholing and […]

In our infancy, An Aquarium Drunkard hosted a semi-regular feature entitled “The Cover Wars” in which a (typically) obscure cover was paired with it’s origin and you the reader would decide the verdict on which one you preferred. One of my favorite’s in this series was Pavement’s cover of the Echo & The Bunnymen new-wave […]

Keeping track of the extended Broken Social Scene cadre and it’s member’s various solo projects (not too mention their related band’s projects) can be an excercise unto itself, which is why it took me until early summer to give Collett’s Idols of Exile a proper run. Released in February of 2006 Idols of Exile […]

I wrote the following about Brightblack in the fall of 2005 after first listening the pair’s ala.cali.tucky album: “Brightblack is made up of longtime friends and musical partners Nabob and Raybob — two Alabama ex-pats now living in the woods of Humboldt County, CA. The duo’s indie-Americana-folk stylings were taken notice by Will Oldham ,who […]

I have my man Kevin solely to thank for turning me on to Jonah Matranga earlier in the week. Matranga’s upcoming Split 12″ with Frank Turner features a cover of Billy Bragg’s “New England” from his first solo release, the 1983 EP Life’s a Riot. It blew me away — I have probably played Bragg’s […]

Note: Re-posting this from last November in memory of Love’s Arthur Lee. Details of Lee’s death and battle with Lieukemia at P’fork.—————————Check out these two bonus tracks off the Rhino re-issue of LOVE’s 1967 masterpiece Forever Changes. **If you haven’t heard this album, do try and get your hands on it. While it may not […]