Natalie Prass makes a bold, stylish debut
Natalie Prass’ self-titled album begins with a sharp intake of breath, a gentle voice dripping with a curious mixture of longing and confidence, and a warm swell of horns and woodwinds.
Use the fields below to perform an advanced search of The Cavalier Daily's archives. This will return articles, images, and multimedia relevant to your query. You can also try a Basic search
44 items found for your search. If no results were found please broaden your search.
Natalie Prass’ self-titled album begins with a sharp intake of breath, a gentle voice dripping with a curious mixture of longing and confidence, and a warm swell of horns and woodwinds.
In 2010, Carrie Brownstein announced that riot grrrl/punk band Sleater-Kinney would put out a new album some time in the next five years. The musician/writer/actress was true to her word: almost exactly five years later, Sleater-Kinney has ended its nine-year hiatus and come roaring back into the spotlight.
Experimental electronic artist Panda Bear opens his fifth solo album, “Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper,” on a gentle note. Starting track “Sequential Circuits” offers a slow, textured piece built on synth organs and a sound like gurgling water. Noah Lennox’s massive harmonies stretch and echo, rich and somber. The song then fades to a closing drone, a sound like a man growling.
Across genres, it has been a pretty great year in music. Note that the following list does not include Sun Kil Moon’s “Benji” (I’ll be honest, I can’t stand Sun Kil Moon) nor does it include U2 (this seems less controversial, but who knows?). Nevertheless, it attempts to highlight some standouts from a stellar-sounding 2014.
Baroque-pop troubadour Damien Rice starts off “My Favourite Faded Fantasy” by sounding a lot like the late, great Jeff Buckley. Granted, Rice has a Irish accent, but his soft electric fingerpicking and incredibly high voice call to the mind “Mojo Pin,” the opening song on Buckley’s album “Grace.”
In his solo career spanning almost 50 years, Neil Young has never been afraid to veer off the beaten path. After practically defining the hard rock sound with 1969’s “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere,” he released the piano-based “After the Goldrush” in 1970. He’s part country-rock, part rockabilly, part electronic, and part grunge. And though he’ll play greatest hits sets when he tours, Neil Young does not care what anyone else wants when it comes to his studio sessions. The results are admirable, yet questionable.
Daniel Lanois most often appears in the role of producer. His signature sonic touch can be found on mid-to-late-era Bob Dylan albums, U2 classics and “Le Noise,” Neil Young’s sparse album consisting only of electric guitar and voice. Lanois is a performer in his own right, and his latest, “Flesh and Machine,” is an interesting effort.
Following his 2011 collection of short poems, “Riffraff,” English Prof. Stephen Cushman has released a book-length poem titled “The Red List.” An in-depth exploration of endangerment and modernity, “The Red List” is rich with insight about human interaction in the modern age. Cushman will read from “The Red List” at the University Bookstore with English Prof. Lisa Russ Spaar Thursday, Nov. 6 at 5:30 p.m.
Following the release of ambitious last album "VA," Virginia natives The Last Bison will bring their uniquely, folksy sound to The Southern Cafe & Music Hall Friday, Nov. 7.
Mark Lanegan’s solo career has been consistent in quality, but marked by stylistic evolution. His first albums from the early 90s are bluesy variations on his work with seminal grunge band Screaming Trees. The songs are aggressive: Lanegan howls in his upper baritone, instrumentations are kept to grunge basics and Kurt Cobain even sings occasional backups. By the late 90s, Lanegan began to experiment with more complex and baroque arrangements, electronic additions, looser interpretations of the blues form and songs with less outright aggression. This culminated in what is arguably his strongest solo album, 2004’s “Bubblegum.”
We Were Promised Jetpacks is an indie outfit known for blending electronic and synth elements into a harder rock sound. The band’s newest release, “Unravelling,” stays true to the style of previous albums — basslines are prominent and percussive, dual reverb-drenched guitars churn out slick riffs, and Adam Thompson sings in his distinctive Scottish lilt. The production is rather dark and heavy on the bass, and several songs incorporate synth into the overall arrangement.
Sitting at a drum set, Tatsuya Nakatani lays a series of small cymbals and “singing bowls” on his snare drums. He moves with speed and fluidity, striking the bowls and cymbals with various sticks or running a long, hand-crafted bow against them to elicit droning tones. With the bowls dashed to the side, he scrapes the edge of a flexible cymbal on the snare drum. The sound of scraping metal rings out and is silenced. Nakatani places the cymbal flat on the drum head, leans over to place his lips on it and blows. The sound is like an elephant in agony: visceral, primitive, piercing.
There are a lot of alternative bands in which a guy and girl sing in unison. Groups like The Young Evils, Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger, Chamber Band and Broods all make use of this style to some extent.
“Babe, there’s something wretched about this / something so precious about this,” Hozier wails on one of his most upbeat songs, “From Eden.” In this line is the essence of bluesy rocker Hozier’s self-titled debut LP, a set of songs themed around joy and suffering.
Sometimes a song just feels intrinsically like a classic. On first listen, you can’t help but wonder how you’ve never heard it before.
Being a Weezer fan can be difficult.
Pop-rock can be tricky. When done right, it synthesizes elements of both pop and rock into a catchy hybrid sound, with both an aggressive edge of rock and crowd-pleasing hooks. In other cases, pop-rock bands get caught between genres, yielding a final product more watered-down than rock and not nearly as dynamic as good pop.
Most of the best episodes of “South Park” meet two key criteria: they satirize at least two completely unrelated things, and they focus on Eric Cartman.
Jason Burke has become a central figure in Charlottesville’s singer-songwriter folk music scene. In the four years since he came to the area, the man who has been a musician since he was 13 says he has experienced a “renaissance” of sorts.
On the front patio of local bar and gourmet burger joint Boylan Heights at 5 p.m. on a Tuesday, something is about to happen. The Currys, a folk-rock band based in Charlottesville since early 2013, tune their bass and guitars and adjust their amp and effects pedals. They soon begin to play, and Boylan Heights and its surroundings are filled with an incredible sound.