If you were an indie rock fan in the early 90′s, The Wedding Present were hard to avoid. And yet…somehow I did. While my friends were filing Bizarro and Seamonsters under Favorite Albums Of All Time, I was thinking that the little bits I heard from those albums didn’t do much for me. But my [...]

Growing up with a concert-promoter uncle certainly had its benefits. Not only did I get free tickets to most of the shows that I went to in the 80′s, but every Christmas, a huge box of cassettes and LPs would arrive at our house: promo albums that my uncle had pulled quickly off his shelves [...]

Bossa Nova from the 50′s and 60′s can be a little tough to take sometimes. Even at the time, a lot of the top-selling stuff was marketed as a combination of easy listening and exotic: the sanitized “world music” of its time. Add to that a couple of generations of changed music tastes, syrupy strings [...]

Bruce Springsteen fanatics are no doubt counting the days until November 16th. On that date, Columbia Records will be releasing The Promise: The Darkness On The Edge Of Town Story, a 3 disc/3 dvd set featuring the remastered Darkness album, a making of doc, current and archived live footage, and best of all, two discs [...]

Quiet music, mostly with acoustic guitars. A frail-voiced singer. Very strong Christian themes and subjects. Songs peppered with the words joy, celebration and love. The ingredients of The Innocence Mission are ones that should add up to something unbearably precious, and I don’t doubt for a second that there are people that couldn’t distinguish between [...]

My feelings about Belle & Sebastian circa 1997 could pretty accurately be described as obsession, bordering on sickness. I once yelled at Stuart Murdoch and Isobel Campbell out a car window in Athens, Georgia. True story! ANYway, one of the things that I loved about them in the late 90′s was the quality of their [...]

Simple Minds is not an obscure band. Nobody’s forgotten “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” and anyone with even a passing interest in 80′s hits will remember at least a couple songs off of their arena-anthem classic Once Upon A Time. They did huge songs as well as U2. They just didn’t follow up on it [...]

STACKS HQ is still very much buzzing from Wilco’s performance last week at the Music Center at Strathmore in Maryland. If you’re a fan of the band and have the opportunity, this current tour is the ideal time to catch them. The band has been performing extended sets, averaging 3 hours in length and featuring [...]

There was much rejoicing around these parts this week with the announcement of the long-awaited return of Scotland’s Teenage Fanclub. Merge will be releasing the bands’ eighth proper album, entitled Shadows, their first since 2005′s stellar Man-Made. Check the details here and while you’re at it grab an mp3 of a new track, “Baby Lee”. [...]

The weird thing about this week’s edition of STACKS is that I honestly had it all planned, half written in my head, at least 24 hours before I heard the terrible news that Alex Chilton had suddenly passed away at the too young age of 59. I had planned on writing about one of my [...]