Billy Bragg Tooth & Nail (Essential) Billy Bragg has always been better at compartmentalizing than his reputation as a political songwriter might suggest. This isn’t to say his political work from the late 1970s isn’t iconic; it’s just that his songs about sex, love, romance, and marriage...

Audio Adrenaline Kings & Queens (Fair Trade Services) One thing that happens from time to time is fratricide. I don’t mean this literally. But it’s basically fact that the Ramones and Sex Pistols came along and made Robert Plant and Jimmy Page seem like dinosaurs, and we’ve all...

Ellen Allien LISm (Bpitch Control) I have been reading Albert Camus’s The Plague for the fourth or fifth time. It is one of my all-time favorite books and, given my tendency to slip into a funk in the springtime, on the short-list of books I pick up when I am wallowing in the mire of depression. Let...

The Howling Hex The Best of the Howling Hex (Drag City) I take my son to kindergarten each morning in a twelve-year-old, salvage-titled CR-V that, incidentally, is missing a muffler. It is a noisy fifteen-minute drive. As if to add insult to injury, the stereo only comes out of one of the speakers. Occasionally,...

If you were to picture the stereotype of a music industry executive sitting in his plush office plotting how to promote a smooth, catchy act who will appeal widely and inoffensively to a large swath of the properly calibrated target demographic, and then go to the opposite of whatever spectrum that is,...

Apparat Krieg und Frieden (Music for Theatre) Mute Apparat’s new album sounds like a soundtrack. And so it is, for a stage production of Krieg und Frieden, or as most English speakers know it, Tolstoy’s War and Peace. After scoring the production, Apparat, whose real name is Sascha Ring, decided...

You don’t look to the Managing Editor of Entertainment Weekly for music tips, but it was still jaw-dropping to read this in his post-Grammy editorial: “Mumford & Sons’ victory established folk rock as the most exciting and artful movement in music right now.” Do people really think that?...

Alasdair Roberts A Wonder Working Stone (Drag City) The last time I wrote about Alasdair Roberts for Burnside, I mentioned the Canadian connection to Scotland. Since then, Quebec has defeated its federalist premier for a Quebec nationalist, and Scotland has proposed a date for an election determining...

Twenty years ago, I sat in my friend’s sparsely furnished Bible-student apartment. We watched a VHS tape we borrowed from the local Christian bookstore. It was put out by some conservative, Focus-on-the-Family-type organization and was a long warning about the dangers of rock and roll music. I was...

About Monty Colvin: Musician, artist, satirist, creative genius, all around good guy… hmmm…. maybe I should just let Monty introduce himself. “I’m Monty Colvin. Some of you may know me as the bass player from the 90′s band, Galactic Cowboys. Others will know me from my solo...