Dave Hayden

Clay AikenMerry Christmas with Love(RCA)Quick, someone throw a turtle-neck sweater on this man and get him a pipe and roaring fire to sit by. (While you’re at it, call Bing Crosby to say he can finally rest in peace.) Clay Aiken’s old-fashioned boy-at- home persona finds its niche in this album that sounds like what […]

Various Poor Boy: Songs of Nick Drake (Songlines)Nick Drake’s music, riding a peak of popularity 25 years after his death, is long overdue for a tribute album. But this recording loses focus by its over- intellectualization of the music, losing sight of the true essence of his songs. Even without being verbatim cover versions, Veda […]

The ThermalsThe Body The Blood The Machine(Sub Pop)For its third album, Portland, Oregon’s Thermals released a sharply executed, prophetic tale of what America would look like as an ultra-right wing religious state governed by a president that assumes his power comes directly from God as wages war for oil and the masses follow as blindly […]

Castle ProjectDiaries of a Broken Heart(White Whale)Ex-Spitfire member Ryan Ostiguy wrote this disc after the dissolution of his marriage. And while the title might lead you to believe that the songwriting will be trite — just another series of over-done love-gone-wrong songs — it’s everything but. Diaries, produced by Howard Redekopp (New Pornographers, 54-40), so […]

Julie DoironGoodnight Nobody (Endearing)As Julie Doiron gets older, her ability to create enchanting and complex music seems to grow ever stronger. Goodnight Nobody is no exception. This is musique verite at its intimate best, as Doiron does her usual combing through daily rituals to find snippets to capture in song—be it waking up to a […]

SeachangeLay of the Land (Matador)Seachange’s debut for the influential Matador Records finds the Nottingham, UK sextet mixing wall-of-sound guitars, searing violin and an enigmatic lyric-spitting vocalist, Dan Eastop, in an erratic display of songwriting. If Lay of the Land maintained the level of intensity exhibited in the tracks “Superfuck,” “Forty Nights” and “Do It Again,” […]

The StoogesThe Weirdness(Virgin)The Stooges, man! Fucking legends! Right? If so, The Weirdness doesn’t really show it. The (New) Stooges don’t offer anything new or exciting to the band’s old formula of out-from-under-a-rock post-punk style it helped define decades ago. And it begs the question: “Why bother?” Back in the day this shit was raw and […]

Rogue Wave10: 1 EP (Sub pop) Rogue Wave’s 2003 gem Out of the Shadow (an album that criminally slipped under the radar) was a delightful mixture of indie-guitar bliss and crafted melodies from the hands of control freak/multi-talented (potential) genius Zach Rogue. With expectations set on high for the band’s follow-up (set for late September), […]

Louis XIVIllegal Tender(Atlantic)Illegal Tender is one fantastic debut EP. Mixing Some Girls-era Stones with the panache of glam-rockers T-Rex and Bowie, Louis XIV keeps it interesting without resorting to cliches. And the result is a nasty romp through the excesses and politically incorrect world of rock and roll, where the sex is as dirty as […]

Eyes for TelescopesThird(independent)s Charlottetown the new Moncton? The answer would be an emphatic “yes” if you heard this disc. This is lo-fi Eric’s Trip territory, right down to the hand-drawn cover-art. The band’s sound is perhaps a little less Syd Barrett and more Randy Bachman, but the same feeling is there—that great albums need not […]