|
|
 |
|
| Featured Selections |
 | Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus
Like the best postmodern art, this too is really modernist, and stridently black modernist at that, an assertion of agency in a mass culture of minstrelsy and fraud. One spasm of Ted Curson’s trumpet in “Original Faubus Fables” is enough to burn segregationist cities and moan half millennia of the blues.
Recommended by
Matt Wanat, Advisor
| |
 | Music from Big Pink
I first heard the Band sometime before I could legally drive. I picked up one of their less significant albums at the Wayne County Public Library in Ohio. I thought the music the strangest thing I had ever heard: old style country music mingled with R&B and rockabilly, heavily produced to sound like America yet, compared with other well produced music I’d heard, seemingly unaffected, of a time but as close to timeless as pop art gets. I discovered Music from Big Pink sometime later, after having shed the first effects the Band had had on me. The album, their first, remains my link to my original initiation into their songs. It is an album full of Saroyan and Sun Records, hatchets and underwater sounds, Curtis Mayfield chasing the Big Bear of Arkansas through alleys in Toronto with Snopeses and ancient modern signs.
Recommended by
Matt Wanat, Advisor | |
 | Fast Times at Barrington High
The Academy Is presents their third full length LP in typical TAI fashion. The upbeat guitar and the catchy lyrics will keep you singing and dancing from start to finish. If you are looking for fun and funky new tunes, check this album out.
Recommended by
Miriam Devere, Program Director & Business Manager | |
 | ...and his mother called him Bill
Duke Ellington's tribute to his artistic soulmate Billy Strayhorn, "...and his mother called him Bill", spotlights the rhythmic complexity and aching melodies of Strayhorn's music.
Recommended by
Bob Bertsch, Advisor | |
 | Time (The Revelator)
Ever wonder how happy John Henry was when he laid down and died? Kick out the footlights with Gillian Welch's instant country classic Time (The Revelator).
Recommended by
Matt Wanat, Advisor | |
 | Cities
This amazing compilation of Christian rock and strong vocals makes this album stick out, and you can't help but sing along to the catchy lyrics! Anberlin has really out done itself this time!
Recommended by
Miriam Devere, Program Director | |
 | Champion Jack Dupree's Blues from the Gutter
"In or about December, 1910 human nature changed"—but Virginia Woolf got the month wrong; it was July 4, the day Jack Dupree was born. Somewhere in the ash pan of time, Abbe Niles is on the 499th verse of "Frankie & Albert"; Ma Rainey, stalked by a tuba player, is trying to tell us so; and the cosmos "reeks of chaos magic." Comparatively speaking, Dupree's Blues from the Gutter may be the world's best juke box.
Recommended by
Matt Wanat, Advisor | |
 | 33Miles
On 33Miles' self-titled debut album, you'll hear very up-beat Christian pop with a twist of country. The album is one of the most fun CDs I have heard in a long time, and best of all, you get the positive message.
Recommended by
Mike Peterson, Producer/Host | |
 | Devotion + Doubt
With love comes the fear of loss. Richard Buckner's "Devotion + Doubt" understands this, sliding from burning desire to dying flame from line to line, and often word to word.
Recommended by
Bob Bertsch, Advisor | |
 | Blue, by Joni Mitchell
It's ridiculous to discuss Joni Mitchell as a seventies singer-songwriter. Her 1971 album Blue should be discussed alongside Lowell's Life Studies and the music of Charles Mingus.
Recommended by
Matt Wanat, Advisor | |
 | Gone Again, by Patti Smith
A serious examination of loss that somehow manages to be very commercial, though commerce mostly failed to notice, Gone Again is the best album by an important artist.
Recommended by
Matt Wanat, Advisor | |
 | On the Beach
On the Beach is full of fallout, snipers, celebrity, and vampirism. Rent Peter Bogdanovich's Targets, listen to Rick Danko's bass line on "Revolution Blues," oil your gun, and, please, please, do nothing about that anger you feel inside.
Recommended by
Matt Wanat, Advisor | |
 | Ragged Glory
Full to bursting with hippie-isms and ostensibly minor lyrics, Neil Young's Ragged Glory may be rock 'n' roll's simplest epic album. Neil left the keys hanging in a swinging door on this one. It's a shame that mass culture's best attempt at entering that door was grunge.
Recommended by
Matt Wanat, Advisor | |
 | Shuffletown
"John is hanging, and the fish are jumping." The line from Joe Henry's great album "Shuffletown" epitomizes the contradiction that is America. "Shuffletown" is Raymond Carver meets William Faulkner, upper Michigan out of North Carolina, a pennywhistle dance on the open sea.
Recommended by
Bob Bertsch, advisor | |
 | For Blood and Empire
Anti-Flag is an anti-establishment rock band that has similar sounds to the likes of the former "Mighty Mighty Bosstones" or "OC Supertones." In their first major-label Album, "For Blood and Empire", Anti-Flag delivers hard-end political messages and truly addictive hooks in such songs like "Emigire", "War Sucks, Let's Party" and "Project for a New American Century". If you have anger at "the system" or just want to rock out to a Bosstones-like band, then "For Blood and Empire" is the perfect album for you.
Recommended by
Mike Peterson, Producer/Host | |
 | Highway 61 Revisited
Forget that this is a "classic" or routinely at the top of greatest lists. Instead, just be entertained, you masochists and meanies, by fleshy and funny surrealism draped like beached channel surfers on a skeleton of blues. High sheriffs' ladies, high modernists, and hoodlums are opening ice cream shacks on the row. This album will outlast the rations brigade. This album's the real deal, approximately.
Recommended by
Matt Wanat, Advisor | |
 | The Face of Love
It is ok to admit you're broken, that you're not all right. The alternative
rock album "The Face of Love" by Sanctus Real features catchy, hooking sounds and mature lyrics that
will most definitely reach the hearts of many people. Also features the song "I'm Not Alright"
which was showcased on MTV U.
Recommended by
Mike Peterson, Producer/Host | |
|
|
