Author: Bob Fish

Album | Annie Oakley – Words We Mean

Twin sisters Sophia and Grace Babb have played music together for years. They especially needed an outlet for their emotions after their father’s suicide. Within a year’s time their friend and violinist, Nia Personette, who had also lost her father,…

Album | Phosphorescent – C’est La Vie

Five years can be a lifetime. Especially when you front a band like Phosphorescent. Yet for Matt Houck it went by in the blink of an eye. Along the way he got married, moved from New York to Nashville, had…

Album | JP Harris – Sometimes Dogs Bark At Nothing

Joshua Pless Harris seems to be the essence of a Kris Kristofferson song: “walking contradiction, partly truth, partly fiction.” Yet Harris has lived enough in 35 years for three men, leaving home at 14, hopping trains, working as a sheet…

Album | Songs For Walter – An Endless Summer Daze

Songs For Walter was originally the name Laurie Hulme gave to a collection of tracks about his grandfather, songs that garnered a great deal of praise. He also received his share of raves from many of the Radio 6 Music…

Album | Amy Helm – This Too Shall Light

Sometimes the only way to avoid a struggle is to allow someone else to take the wheel. Amy Helm needed help in order to be set free when it came to recording her latest LP. Producing her first album herself…

Album | Villagers – The Art of Pretending To Swim

Conor O’Brien seems to be living in two worlds. The first is the folky world of his first release in 2010 Becoming A Jackal, the second a more danceable iteration from this years release, The Art of Pretending To Swim.…

Album | The Jellyman’s Daughter – Dead Reckoning

More than just a name for their second long player, Emily Kelly and Graham Coe of The Jellyman’s Daughter know Dead Reckoning is a way of calculating one’s current position. While not the most accurate approach, it gets the job…

Album | Dawn Landes – Meet Me At The River

The career of Dawn Landes hasn’t run in a straight line. She has always gone where the spirit moved her, never making the safe choice. That would explain why she released Covers, an EP of tunes by Bruce Springsteen, Tom…

Live | Pitchfork Music Festival – Union Park, Chicago

Friday, July 20, 2018 In a light drizzle, Chicago’s own The Curls took to the stage at 1 p.m. Blending everything from the B-52s to Frank Zappa, this five-piece band didn’t even notice the weather as they played with abandon. Throwing out…

Album | Lizzie Weber – You

At the end of a very painful breakup, Lizzie Weber harnessed her emotions in a set of songs that were too painful to perform. Now, some four years later, the scars have lost much of their sting. The results found…