Kim Moberg offers tuneful variety on Up Around The Bend
Kim Moberg’s sophomore album Up Around The Bend cruises through many different approaches to the songwriting craft. Offering folk drenched ditties, edgier, electric guitar driven numbers, and even a swaggering country shuffle song, Up Around The Bend gives proof to Moberg’s strongest point. She can deliver the goods in a variety of musical settings. Opening […]
Singer-songwriter Linda Marks gets even better on Songs At The Heart Of Life
Linda Marks’ latest album release, Songs At The Heart of Life, her second this year, beautifully captures where this Waltham, Massachusetts-based pianist-singer-songwriter is at in her life journey. Her singing and playing a light, sophisticated jazz; her lyrics shiny bright and gloriously hopeful. Opening track “The River” has a folk flavored ebullience. It’s all in […]
Matt Zajac’s Garden Of Hedon an exceptionally strong album
Matt Zajac’s latest album Garden Of Hedon features nude figures beside waterfall in a private jungle. The striking album cover imagery reflects the strong musical personality that central-Massachusetts-based Zajac brings to his music. Singer-songwriter-guitarist-drummer for this album, he delivers all of his songs with a strong musical personality. His music isn’t so much hard rocking […]
Sugar Cones travel the fast lane well on Road Soda
Sugar Cones latest album Road Soda offers plenty of new wave, goth rock, and a few other genres and influences that they inject into their tension filled rock and roll. Each listen to this gem of a CD from this popular Rhode Island band will reveal something that went unnoticed the last time. There are […]
Mike Renzi with Jim Porcella offer fine jazz holiday album, Christmas Is: December Duets
Mike Renzi with Jim Porcella have recorded a solid jazz Christmas album, December Is: Christmas Duets. Sure to become a holiday favorite with all who purchase it, this album offers lively, warm, and time tested standards and one likable original co-written by Renzi. These tunes have been arranged here as accessible jazz, classy as well […]
Michael Cleary accomplishes much on Last Man Standing with pared down, singer-songwriter approach
It is difficult to pigeonhole New Haven’s Michael Cleary’s new album Last Man Standing. Stripped of his Michael Cleary Band, Cleary shoots for a singer-songwriter approach with some rock and roll edge. Yet, that attempt at definition falls short. His appeal might also cross over into adult contemporary listening. Backed by a danceable beat, opening […]
Molly Pinto Madigan impresses with stunning folk art masterpiece, The Ballad Of Tam Lin
Molly Pinto Madigan’s new folk opera The Ballad Of Tam Lin feels as epic in each track as it does as a whole. Each number has its own story arc, playing out lyrically, musically, and vocally like a story within itself. Yet, each manages to piece together one epic tale, a legend love encounter. Listeners […]
Singer-songwriter Linda Marks achieves greater heights on The Piano
Linda Marks offers her best CD yet with The Piano. While Marks’s previous discs were pleasantly breezy, unwieldy in a good way, her song craft sharpens here, becomes more structured with a plentitude of snappy instrumental parts, lilting vocals, and a considerate layering of voice, piano, and many other instruments. Additionally, Marks offers all originals […]
Sado Domestics do things their own special way on Hey, Oaxaca
Boston- based Sado Domestics have a new CD called Hey, Oaxaca, and it thrives and flourishes on the strength of a number nice touches, interesting contrasts, and some fine harmony. Opening track “Across” delivers an old-fashioned, jaunty folk feel in its brisk chord progression and in its lilting groove. Chris Gleason and Lucy Martinez follow […]
Barbara Cassidy Band shine like a star on A Winter Frame Of Mind
Released this month, Barbara Cassidy Band serve up a tasteful eight song post card with A Winter Frame Of Mind. Heading toward the cold season, this collection is arriving right on time. With a knack for nailing down traditional folk and Celtic idioms, Cassidy and her friends have come up with a dandy to return […]
