Ken Tucker

Slaid Cleaves: 'Still Fighting' With Smart Lyrics And Stories

Ken Tucker — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 16:03:00 +0000

Raised in South Berwick, Maine, and residing in Austin, Texas, Slaid Cleaves is no one's idea of a music-industry insider. He writes and sings songs primarily about working-class people and romantics both hopeful and hopeless. That said, it's also not difficult to hear another element of the fortysomething Cleaves' past: He was an English and philosophy major at Tufts, and his lyrics are underpinned by both a fine sense of meter and moral perspicacity.

Jason Isbell: Literary, But Keeping An Edge On 'Southeastern'

Ken Tucker — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 18:01:00 +0000

When Jason Isbell was part of Drive-By Truckers, his guitar contributed to the band's sometimes magnificent squall of noise, while his songwriting contributed to the eloquence that raised the band high in the Southern rock pantheon. But the group was led by two other first-rate songwriters, Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley.

Vampire Weekend Comes Of Age In 'The City'

Ken Tucker — Tue, 28 May 2013 16:02:00 +0000

The New York City band Vampire Weekend has carved out a sense of immaculate melancholy for our era as surely as Steely Dan once did for Upstate New York in the '70s. Characterized most immediately by the earnest, concise, sometimes surprisingly expansive vocals of Ezra Koenig, Vampire Weekend makes atmospheric music.

Daft Punk: Accessing Electronic Music's Humanity

Ken Tucker — Wed, 22 May 2013 15:14:00 +0000

I freely admit that, until the new Random Access Memories, I wasn't much of a Daft Punk fan. I could appreciate the craft and imagination that went into creating the French duo's mixture of electronic genres — techno, house, disco — but the mechanical repetitions and heavily filtered vocals didn't turn me on in any other way.

But now, Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo have come up with an album that exposes the human side of their musical impulses.

Dawes Knows Where It's Been And Where It's Headed

Ken Tucker — Tue, 14 May 2013 16:07:00 +0000

If you heard the Dawes song "Just Beneath the Surface" and said, "Somebody's been listening to their old Jackson Browne albums," you're not exactly insulting Dawes. The band has actually backed Browne on tour — and Browne has sung backup on at least one of its songs — so you could say that Dawes comes by its riffs and phrasing honestly.