Posts Tagged ‘Julia Cooper’
CD Review: The Bad Hand’s This Is No Time for Modesty
June 16th, 2008 | 
Author: By Julia Cooper
San Francisco experimental trio the Bad Hand seems like the kind of group that’ll try anything once. On This Is No Time for Modesty, the band’s staple rock instrumental base of guitar, Rhodes piano, and drums gets invaded by a gaggle of other genres and sounds, resulting in an ambitious mix of kitchen-sink sonic collages with varying degrees of success.
The band certainly offers enough surprises to satisfy anyone bored with the verse-chorus-verse same-old same-old, as the musicians follow a slew of paths within the album and on the songs themselves. Just when you begin to brace yourself for an all-instrumental record, “Hell Bent” drops in soft, girly vocals; or dirgy grunge falls into good ol’ Southern blues on “Then He Tried to Kiss Me”; or an interlude of fart-like kazoo sounds (“Short Door”) creeps into the batch.
CD Review: Mia and Jonah’s Rooms for Adelaide
By Julia Cooper
Americana tag team Mia and Jonah may be the musical equivalent of mac and cheese: Just as hearty helpings of the comfort food offer a simple but soothing cure for empty stomachs, the spare, commiserative melodies composing the Oakland duo’s second full-length, Rooms for Adelaide, transpire as the recipe to fill empty souls.
Posted in indie folk, oakland | Tags: Adelaide, cd, Julia Cooper, melodies, musical equivalent, oakland