“Kiss me” read red lips, flashing across the cover. Like a dare that won’t stop there, they repeat: Three times. Three strikes. Three bullets
Category: Album Impressions
Carry Fire: Just as golden as it glitters
Throughout Carry Fire, some coals burn hotter than others, but none flameout. Instead, they move through the skin with the comfort of a warm winter treat, a hot chocolate for the soul.
Sex + Food: UMO, kinda like Prince
UMO is kinda like a lo-fi prince. And I’m talking the gigolo of funk, the true king of the Eighties prince: capital-P Prince.
Multi-Love: Y’know, that funk band, UMO
The third album is a pain in the ass, an asshole, a bastard. It broke the Mint Chicks and sent Ruben Nielson scurrying to Portland, Oregon to cache himself in graphic design and commercial art. However, the foxhole he ended up in was a basement studio filled with all the gadgets and toys a growing musician needs.
II: UMO’s very next day
We may have been too carried away last record not to notice that the now-known Mortal behind the Orchestra didn’t particularly enjoy being high as a kite on a mountainside all the time. Perhaps we forgot why it’s called a daytrip and why we take them. Abnormal days require special cool-down times.
Ruins: First Aid Kit sees grief in chroma-key
Ruins expressly never falls in to the trap. It stays light-footed, yet heart-heavied. Too loud to be Simon and Garfunkel, too soft to be HAIM. Too mental to fall asleep on its lyricism, too laid-back to depart the beds of each song.
Band of Joy: Something Comes From Nothing
Darrell Scott may wax his lap steel guitar to its most opaque or Byron House may whack his bass guitar into didgeridoo-type drones or Marco Giovino inhabits each cut with on-beat percussion or Patty Griffin and Bekkah Bramlett may sing like spectres on the end of Plant’s lower register or Buddy Miller may manage to wrap it all into nice package with a cute li’l bow n’ all, it still sounds like this is the re-reburnishing of a car marque …
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