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iTunes New Music Releases

Release Date: September 29, 2009
Genre: Rock
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Discover New Music

  • The Last 5 Years (2002 Off-Broadway Cast)

    • 10 out of 10
    • Jason Robert Brown
    • The soundtrack to this moving off-broadway musical is heart moving. The lyrics follow a couple in a relationship for five years, one point of view going forward in time, and the other tracing time fr
  • An Evening with George Shearing & Mel Torm�

    • 10 out of 10
    • Mel Torm� & George Shearing
    • Of the three men who taught me how to sing, the last was Mel Torme. Apparently, Mel Torme is a joke to anyone more than a decade older than me, a living parody of a Vegas crooner. But I stumbled on th
  • Supernature

    • 10 out of 10
    • Goldfrapp
    • On their latest CD, Supernature, Goldfrapp has put together a successful mix of 1980-era New Romanticism, German cabaret, and T. Rex glam that leaves you riveted even through the album's lulls. It's a great amalgam that sounds current without sounding at all dated.

  • Life's Rich Pageant

    • 8 out of 10
    • R.E.M.
    • In the long series of R.E.M.'s evolution, this album (finally?) showcases their ability to capture on tape what had been happening in the live for years: heartfelt, sweat-filled performances that just
  • Supermodified

    • 10 out of 10
    • Amon Tobin
    • The genius is in the beats. Amon Tobin creates fantastic, groovy beats behind beats. "Supermodified" rolls through your expectations of breakbeat music, and turns them up a bit. It's a mellow album, p

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iTunes Music Review - Gimme Fiction

  • Gimme Fiction

    • 10 out of 5
    • Spoon
    • Reviewed by Bryan Chaffin
    • Buy this album from Amazon.com
    • Buy this album from iTunes Music Store
    • Gimme Fiction by Spoon is a terrific album by an Austin band that I was lucky enough to catch on an Austin radio station during a Christmas visit. "I Turn My Camera On" was the name of the tune, and its slowed-down Franz Ferdinand meets Beck singing "Emotional Rescue" flavor immediately grabbed me, and I literally went out to get the CD a couple of hours later.

      "Was It You?" also reveals the Beck influence on this band, but the rest of the album seems to have more roots in the 70s -- and I do mean the part of the 70s that didn't suck -- than anything more recent.

      The band lays down instrumental tracks somewhere between minimalist and layered that act as the perfect backdrop to the vocals of Britt Daniel. At the same time, however, neither those vocals nor the instrumentation sound like an afterthought, and that's something few bands know how to do.

      For instance, listen to the interplay between bass, guitar, and vocals in "Was It You?" or the integral role the sparse clapping plays in "They Never Got You." In Gimme Fiction, every note and every sound seems to have a purpose, combining into one of the best albums of 2005, and one of the better recordings of the last five years.

      You can stream a video for "Sister Jack," the single the band's label is pushing, at Merge Records' Web site.

      Favorite Tunes: I Turn My Camera On, Was It You?, My Mathematical Mind, They Never Got You, The Infinite Pet

     

     

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