Music Notes: Neil Young, Woods, Health and Crushed Butler

1. The question isn’t if Woods have put out the best album of the summer, it’s whether At Echo Lake is the best album to bubble up out of the Brooklyn underground this year.  It’s really hard to say, and to be honest, I shouldn’t even make a statement like that — it’s barely June! 2009’s Songs of Shame has stayed on my turntable since I made the proclamation that it was one of the best albums of the year, […]

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New Woods Album, At Echo Lake, out in May

Songs of Shame by Woods was one of my favorite albums of 2009, so the bands forthcoming, At Echo Lake is without a doubt one of the albums I’m most anticipating this year. Listen: Woods, “I was gone” “At Echo Lake feels like a diamond-sharp distillation of the turbulent power of their live shows, in much the same way that The Grateful Dead’s “Dark Star” single amplified and engulfed the planetary aspect of their improvised takes. Some of the material […]

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Bites: Literary award kvetching, Bradbury paints, Obama is the big winner, Woods do Daytrotter, and more

Remember yesterday when I said more Jewish people will kvetch about Amos Oz or Philip Roth not getting the Nobel Prize for Literature?  Tablet mentions the Tribe losing out, talks about Herta Mueller, and ties it all up with “Also intriguing: the Times notes that her father served in the SS during World War II.” Lit. Ray Bradbury was a regular Bob Ross. The Forward talks about Elie Wiesel’s “meandering, sometimes, narcissistic ruminations” on medieval French commentator of the Talmud […]

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