LATEST BLOG POSTS

• January 3, 6:35 PM EDT

  December's Best Concerts, From Patti Smith to Phish By David Fricke

  I usually take a short break from writing at the end of each year. I never take a vacation from gigs. Here are some highlights from the New York nights that lit up the end of my road to 2011. Zappa Plays Zappa, Beacon Theater, December 17, 2010 The news of Captain Beefheart's death that day, at 69 after a long battle with multiple sclerosis, was still fresh and hurting when I got to the venue, just in time for a long looney lift: a complete performance of Frank Zappa's 1974 Top Te... | MORE »

• December 27, 1:00 PM EDT

  Fricke's Picks: Top 2010 Reissues from Under the Radar By David Fricke

  There are the big-box monsters and major-artist retrospectives, rightly celebrated in our year-end issue. Then there is the scholarship from under the radar and along the margins, those archaeological digs and passion projects that make a wider deeper history come alive. Here are 10 from '10 that will reward further study, well into the new year. Procol Harum, Exotic Birds and Fruit (Salvo)The British acid-pomp band defied the mounting common wisdom that it was long past its kaftan-glor... | MORE »

• December 23, 3:45 PM EDT

  Fricke's Picks: A Personal Top 10 By David Fricke

  Annual Top 10 lists are not always what they should be. It is very easy to fall back on records that seemed important to the year's cultural arguments, rather than those that regularly delivered solace, challenge and release. This is only a list of what mattered to me in 2010, in regular inspiring rotation. Alejandro Escovedo, Street Songs of Love (Fantasy)Still not the star he should be, this Texas-born singer-songwriter wrote the year's best bruising songs about the complications... | MORE »

• December 21, 12:55 PM EDT

  Best Reissues of the Year By David Fricke

  Bob Dylan The Bootleg Series, Vol. 9 — The Witmark Demos: 1962-1964 Columbia/LegacyThese rough sketches, made by Dylan for his song publishers to register copyright and solicit covers, are actually the sound of seismic change: the ascent of the singer-songwriter, at the expense of Tin Pan Alley, and his dazzling maturation as a composer. Talking-blues and protest grenades give way to a robust grace and emotional acuity that peaks, despite a tossed-off reading, in "I'll Keep It With... | MORE »

• December 20, 4:20 PM EDT

  Five Obscure But Great John Lennon Solo Tracks By David Fricke

  John Lennon wrote, recorded and released a lifetime's worth of music in his solo years, more than he could fit on the official releases. As part of our Lennon celebration, on the 30th anniversary of his death, here is some deeper dynamite: five of my favorite outtakes and orphans from the roots and detours of Lennon's rock & roll life.   "Yer Blues," The Dirty Mac, Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus, 1968 In 1968, the Beatles announced a return to live performance with ... | MORE »

• December 10, 6:15 PM EDT

  Twenty Underappreciated John Lennon Solo Songs By David Fricke

  John Lennon's solo career was as rich and turbulent as his years in the Beatles, a whirl of hits, adventure and emotional crisis. On the 30th anniversary of his passing and in conjunction with Rolling Stone's landmark publication of "The Lost Lennon Tapes" – Jonathan Cott's epic interview just days before Lennon's death – here are twenty tracks from the official studio albums that deserve extra limelight. Click to see the full list | MORE »

• December 8, 12:53 PM EDT

  A Crimson King Performs Solo in New York By David Fricke

  

  I had lunch with Robert Fripp, the founding guitarist of the British progressive-rock institution King Crimson, Friday afternoon in the Winter Garden atrium at the World Financial Center. I had a sandwich — Swiss cheese and tomato on rye. He played a Les Paul guitar, through a five-foot-high stack of digital-effect racks, on a stage at the far west end of the space, with his back to the Hudson River. The performance was the first of four recitals there: lunch and dinnertime perfo... | MORE »

• November 17, 4:48 AM EDT

  Mythic Syd Barrett Track Surfaces By David Fricke

  

  Buried in the tiny black-on-purple print on the back cover of An Introduction to Syd Barrett (Capitol) — a new anthology of Syd Barrett's short lifetime on record, as the founding guitarist in Pink Floyd and an acid-damaged solo artist — is an offer you cannot resist: a bonus download of a previously unreleased track from the protracted and chaotic sessions for Barrett's 1970 album, The Madcap Laughs. Don't get too excited: "Rhamadan" is a 20-minute instrumental wi... | MORE »

• November 16, 2:31 AM EDT

  Sigur Ros Debut Solo Projects in a Church By David Fricke

  

  The Icelandic band Sigur Rós make music of long vocal sighs and bowed-guitar drone suspended in oceans of reverb. So singer-guitarist Jónsi Birgisson and pianist Kjartan Sveinsson surely felt at home at the Church of St. Paul the Apostle in Manhattan, where they gave live premieres of respective individual works, outfitted with orchestra and choir, on November 15th as part of Lincoln Center's White Lights Festival and the independent Wordless Music series. Sveinsson, who arranges the ... | MORE »

• November 10, 5:45 AM EDT

  Worlds Collide at the New York Debut of the Supergroup Afrocubism By David Fricke

  

  History repeated itself, unecessarily, en route to the New York concert debut of Afrocubism, the Cuban-Malian superband featuring singer-guitarist Eliades Ochoa of the Buena Vista Social Club, the kora virtuoso Toumani Diabaté and electric guitarist Djelimady Tounkara. A few days before the November 9th show at Town Hall, Bassekou Kouyate — a master of the ngoni, an African lute, who plays on the magnificent new album, Afrocubism (World Circuit/Nonesuch) — was denied entry ... | MORE »