Heavy-hearted in the Midwest since 2011
It’s been over five years since My Morning Jacket have released an album. That album was The Waterfall, a solid set of pop and rock tunes that followed in the footsteps 2011s Circuital. Circuital seemed to be looking for a middle ground musically between the shoot-for-the-moon audacity of Evil Urges and the band’s earlier, more […]
Read More My Morning Jacket : The Waterfall IIJustin Pinkerton is a musician’s musician. Playing in bands as diverse as Golden Void, Planes of Satori, The Roots of Orchis, Eyes, The Finches, Moholy Nagy and with such artists as Rafter Roberts and Scott Pinkmountain over the last 20 years, Pinkerton has built a reputation as a go-to collaborator. Firmly entrenched in the California […]
Read More Psych Rock and Sunday Jazz : A Conversation With Glass Parallels’ Justin PinkertonThe name Justin Pinkerton is synonymous with California psych. He’s played in Golden Void, Roots of Orchis, and Corsic, and in 2018 Pinkerton released and album as Futuropaco, an amazing Italio/psych groovefest. That record was this time capsule to mid-to-late-60s Italy and European countrysides, slathered in masterful drums, fuzz guitars, and the feeling of losing […]
Read More Glass Parallels : Aisle Of LightWe are officially into the dog days of summer, and boy oh boy what a dog it is. Like Cujo mixed with the Rottweiler in The Omen with a touch of those hellhounds Robert Johnson sang about. Between the virus, the protests, and a large portion of the population of the world that doesn’t take […]
Read More Let Remington super 60 Brighten Your Day With “Still Near”I started my No Joy journey back in 2013 with the incredible Wait To Pleasure. It was a glorious beginning to a longstanding love affair with the Canadian shoegaze/post-punk/dream pop outfit fronted by Jasamine White-Gluz. From that I stepped back to Ghost Blonde and was floored by the sonic shift between those two records. No […]
Read More No Joy’s “Nothing Will Hurt”; ‘Motherhood’ Drops August 21stOccasionally you come across someone that possesses talent and creativity which seems to stretch way beyond their years on this earth. One such individual is Portland’s Elihu Knowles. Knowles is a 21-year old composer, jazz drummer, and vocalist, but he carries the confidence of a seasoned artist. Someone that seems to have stepped into the […]
Read More Aaron Space & His Terrestrial Underlings : FishlandBlake Mills is the go-to producer and musical shaman at the moment, but he’s so much more than that. His 2014 record Heigh Ho proved as much, giving us sardonic and breezy songs about life and messing up and falling in love and disappointing those around us. It brought to mind folks like Randy Newman, […]
Read More Blake Mills : Mutable SetUp until a couple months ago I only knew actor Caleb Landry Jones as Banshee from X Men : First Class and the creepy brother of Allison Williams in Jordan Peele’s Get Out. I also thought that he was Irish for some strange reason. Turns out he’s from Garland, Texas, and besides being an amazing […]
Read More Caleb Landry Jones : The Mother StoneAdam Schlesinger and Chris Collingwood wrote songs that stayed in your brain and your heart long after the music stopped. I wasn’t quite 23 when the first Fountains of Wayne album had come out, but I was well on my way to adulthood. I’d gotten married just a couple months prior to the record dropping, […]
Read More Everything’s Ruined : RIP Adam SchlesingerIt feels like Kevin Parker has finally found the perfect balance between the scrappy psych rock Tame Impala and the more nuanced, pop-inflected Tame Impala we’ve been hearing since 2015s Currents. Parker has never made it a secret that he had much loftier goals than just making his debut Innerspeaker over and over again. Even […]
Read More Tame Impala : The Slow Rush