Thank you to the readers — Tomtit Music Reviews is where I write about any music release I feel like. Each review is brief, usually one paragraph just over 200 words, although the latest batch contains a few departures from that format. I hope you’ll check them out and won’t hesitate to drop a comment, however…

College Folk Album × In Nashville — Ryoko Moriyama was part of Japan’s folk boom in the Sixties and Seventies, a time when vinyl records sounded best. The mixing, mastering and pressing resulted in a spacious, warm sound perfect for conveying the character of Moriyama’s voice, cozy and lucent. On College Folk Album (Philips, 1969), she sings…

Davis delivers a one-two combo worthy of a heavyweight champ — There’s heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson on the cover of Miles Davis’s Jack Johnson (Columbia, 1971), driving a flashy car, smiling his golden smile, and surrounded by beautiful women. There’s Davis in the interior art, in the ring and looking ready to shadowbox the cameraman. And there’s guitarist John McLaughlin…

The Replacements frontman delivers a master class in songwriting — Verse, chorus, bridge. The fundamental building blocks of songcraft are enough for the best musicians to work wonders over and over without ostentation. This is abundantly clear on 14 Songs (Sire/Reprise, 1993), the first solo album from Paul Westerberg of early alt-rockers The Replacements. Whereas creativity for many artists is…

Kickass for the crowd that still isn’t sold on Babymetal — Environmental apocalypse, nuclear apocalypse, virological apocalypse, A.I. apocalypse. . . Take your pick. Doomsaying is nothing new, but there does seem to be a growing sense that things really are getting worse. And from the sound of In Flames on Foregone, the band’s 15th full-length studio album, the Swedish metal…

The sound of authoritariansim sickening free spirits — If, as Aristotle wrote in Poetics, art depends on mimesis, then what has Trent Reznor been imitating all these years? From Nine Inch Nails to soundtracks for films such as The Social Network, Reznor uses a precise collection of synthesizers and drum machines to create music that bangs, hums, saws…

Think twice before pressing play on this gothic thriller — Christian Bale is one of the greatest actors of our time who hasn’t won the Academy Award for Best Actor. He’s good enough that even in the case of a less than stellar film, it’s more plausible that the film ill-used him than the other way around. …

Behold undeniable proof that sampling is indeed an art — In 2000, The Avalanches did for music what William Dreyer did in 1929 by inventing rocky road ice cream: They mixed disparate great stuff into harmonious perfection.¹ Since I Left You, the Australian group’s debut on Modular Recordings, showcases an encyclopedic love of music through reems of samples reaching back…

Don’t miss one of the greatest rock songs of all time — Whether it’s Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” or Starship’s “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now,” vocalist Grace Slick had uncommon power and volume, so when I read, possibly here, that she considered Emily Armstrong of Dead Sara to be one of her favorite female vocalists, I wasted no time checking out the…