Mister Heavenly 'Out of Love' The CLUAS verdict: 8 out of 10 Full Review: Artists tread a fine line when they dabble with the idea of a super group. The end product will invariably be judged by their former glories and, in many cases, will not survive such a comparison. Thankfully, Nick Thorburn (The Islands), Ryan Kattner (Man Man) & Joe Plummer (Modest Mouse) surpass expectations with their incendiary incarnation Mister Heavenly. Inspired by their shared love of doo wop and avant garde indie, Mister Heavenly exist within a genre of their own creation: doom-wop. Their debut release Out of Love is a modern revision of the 50s pop era, full of macabre tales of heartache and disaffection. Their playfully ironic love songs are written for a generation more accustomed to text message breakups than Dear John letters.  The two-stepping “Charlyne” is a satire of the sweetheart ballad with a surf rock vibe in the style of The Beach Boys. A ... [Read on]

When Easy Star records set out to release a reggae adaptation of Dark side of the moon in 2003, they were faced with the perilous task of staying true to the original while taking the music in a whole new direction. With musical director Michael Goldwasser at the helm, the label went in search of a supporting cast strong enough to undertake such an ambitious project. Drafting some of the finest musicians the New York scene had to offer, they created a dream team of modern reggae; the Easy Star All Stars. The album has remained on the Billboard reggae charts ever since. In the eight years that followed, the band have released seminal versions of Radiohead’s Ok Computer and The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band; garnering praise from fans and critics alike. And now with the release of First Light, their first full-length original album, the band are ready to show the world that there’s more to the Easy Star All Stars than trips down n... [Read on]

Kristin Hersh is reminiscing about her early tours with the Throwing Muses, the influential art-rock band she formed as a teenager in the early eighties with her stepsister Tanya Donnelly. The Pixies were their opening act. ‘Yeah, they were always our support act when we went out on tour’ she tells me, down the line from her home in Laguna Beach, California. ‘We brought them with us because we didn’t want to be alone. We brought them to 4AD too because we didn’t want to alone on the label there either with all those English bands that were so pretty, gauzy and ethereal and we knew we were nothing like that!’ she remembers, laughing ‘The Pixies just kept us from being lonely’. Throwing Muses, along with Sonic Youth and the aforementioned Pixies, were key figures in the alternative rock scene in the US in the eighties and nineties, and paved the way for Nirvana and the alt-rock explosion that followed. Yet, Hersh is not one for lo... [Read on]