“Edgewater was once a pretty normal ‘burb,” writes Drew Ballard, the narrator of Major Inversions. “Now, everyone you meet is in the process of becoming something.” This little seaside town has undergone some growing pains in the past couple of years. It is the suburb of what is becoming a burgeoning film town, the Hollywood of the eastern seaboard: Wilmington, North Carolina. It might not have Hollywood’s platinum sparkle, but movies get made in Wilmington, and everyone wants to get a break in the industry. As such, everyone in Edgewater …

Supergroups are all the rave this decade.  Velvet Revolver.  Audioslave.   The Raconteurs.  Chickenfoot.  Next in line are the Monsters of Folk: Bright Eyes’ Conor Oberst, super-producer Mike Mogis, Retro-Nuevo troubadour M. Ward, and My Morning Jacket front man Jim James.  If the gold standard is the Traveling Wilburys—and it is—the Traveling Wilburys they are not, despite so many media types deeming them to be the next coming.  Nor are they folk in the most Woody Guthrie sense of the word.  Neither declaration is their fault– somebody inevitably has to label …

Jónsi & Alex is Jónsi Birgisson, Sigur Rós vocalist/guitar player-with-bow extraordinaire, and Alex Somers, musician and visual artist to, among others, Sigur Rós.  On their debut album, Riceboy Sleeps, they combine for one mother of a meandering glide through the subtleties of sound.  The album started as a side project between Sigur Rós recordings and that’s about the best place to start talking about it.  While Sigur Rós two most recent studio releases, Takk… and Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaus are—dare I say—more accessible/less steam-of-consciousness than their predecessors— …

These days it’s getting harder and harder to find something to smile about. Grin, the second album of Toronto-based blueVenus offers itself for consideration.  Grin is a tale of hurdles; the overcoming of them, the outright avoidance of them, and the tracks of tears and smiles of the miles in between.
The album starts with the title-track and for a few seconds it sounds like you’re about to head down to O Brother, Where Art Thou? country.  But right before you get to the crossroads, blueVenus hits the breaks on Bourbon …

A strange question occurred to me as Backspacer drew to a close for the first time on my stereo; it was about halfway through what is certainly the band’s most mature song yet, the cinematic and winsome “The End,” a song both about death and the presence of life: what would Kurt Cobain be doing right now, at this very minute?
It isn’t stealing Eddie’s moment. And it isn’t a question that has occurred to me during any other Pearl Jam song to this point. Maybe it was the subject matter …