Pianist-keyboardist Luis Resto spent years as one of Detroit’s best-kept secrets, lending his supple fingers to albums from artists as diverse as Anita Baker, Patti Smith and his first big gig, Was (Not Was). The real breakout arrived earlier this decade, when Resto became one of Eminem’s go-to studio collaborators: That’s his piano figure you’ve heard countless times at the start of “Lose Yourself,” which earned him an Oscar for his cowriting efforts.

Now Resto is putting his piano at the fore of his own project… a delightfully eclectic set of songs showcasing the music in progress, and revealing Resto’s tasteful meshing of jazz, soul, rock and electronica. Promising stuff from a veteran who seems ripe to step out and get Read the full story

No Age :: Teen Creeps
Lucky Dragons :: Complement Song

No Age: the name alone suggests multiple meanings and possible interpretations—timeless, ageless, anonymous, free from restriction, something positive from something negative… a profound strength in its simplicity. Likewise, the Los Angeles duo consisting of drummer/vocalist Dean Spunt and guitarist Randy Randall is many things at once even as it embraces its minimalism.

Spiritual heirs to both Thurston Moore’s wide-eyed experimentalism and the all-encompassing, stark DIY art-is-life aesthetic of the Crass collective, No Age is the kind of band that inspires its audience without affectation, without cynicism. Its live shows are an exploration of possibilities: a guitar laid over a resonating drum head, effect loops woven together like beautiful harmonies, pop songs as performance art, a duo that sounds like the gale force of rock history delivered through a wind tunnel.

The pair’s powerful force, both as a band and Read the full story

Women :: Eyesore
DD/MM/YYYY :: Digital Haircut

On their debut self-titled album, Women embraced sonic brashness that deeper examination revealed to be tinted with sly pop melody. With “Public Strain” the band have honed a sound truthful to that reverb drenched noise while allowing the pop sensibilities to surface into clearer focus.

In fall of 2009, Patrick Flegel (vocals/guitar), Matt Flegel (bass/vocals), Chris Reimer (guitar/vocals), and Michael Wallace (drums) went into the studio with an abundance of ideas, working around conflicting schedules and graveyard shifts. With Chad VanGaalen again on production duties, the band laboriously crafted a timeless sounding recording over the dead of winter in Alberta, Canada. The result exploits their usage of harsh, grating dissonance in smaller and controlled doses, using noise as the foundation for richly structured, layered Read the full story

Chapstik
Hellmouth
Today I Wait
Snakewing
The Amino Acids
Bill Bondsmen
Aggro Or Die!
The Plague Years
Boom Swagger Boom
Lost Coves (from NYC)
Destroy The Moon

Brendan Benson :: A Whole Lot Better
The Posies :: Licenses To Hide

Late afternoon, Miami, and Iggy Pop and I were standing watching for a manatee that occasionally swims up along the river at the end of his garden. Pop was bare-chested in cerise trousers, talking about Brendan Benson. “Well you know Brendan,” he said, “you how Brendan is, how Brendan sounds…” and as he spoke he waved his hand, stirring the warm air.

He was telling me why he had invited Benson to sing on a track on the Stooges’ 2007 album the Weirdness. “I wanted a sweet, clean, effortless American voice on that particular chorus,” he explained, as we looked down the river. “And Brendan had the voice.”

It wasn’t until this moment that I truly realised the Americanness of Brendan Benson. I’d long had him pinned as an Anglophile; heard in the glint of his lyrics, in the texture of his music, the influence of Elvis Costello, the Beatles, Bowie.

But as Pop pointed out, it was an Americanness lay in that voice. Benson’s voice has a gleam to it, a West Coast shimmer, the shine of a sleek new fender. When I hear Brendan Benson sing I think of the furl on a Coca Cola bottle, of broad Midwestern skies and Read the full story

Love music? Join us next Tuesday at The Majestic Cafe for another ADEM Listening Pary! Music journalist Gary Graff will be there to sift through new songs, plus a performance by Doop and the Inside Outlaws. Submit your song ideas in the Discussion Tab on the ADEM Facebook Page and get ready to discover some new favorites!

http://www.facebook.com/AnnDelisiEssentialMusic

http://www.wdet.org/ADEMlisteningparty.php

Designer Drugs (Michael Vincent Patrick and Theodore Paul Nelson) lead lifestyles of the rich and famous, but are really just poor boys who love helicopters and pop banger music…and a few other things that will not be noted. Currently, Designer Drugs is releasing new material with Iheartcomix Records. They’ve also been found partying on the couch at the Iheartcomix office.

With one member attending med school and the other drinking whiskey across the globe, to keep from going crazy last year – the DD boys produced over 23 remixes and DJ’d over 100 shows around the world. This year, to keep from going crazy, Designer Drugs is putting the focus on original material while continuing to tour the galaxy and party harder than Read the full story

Shearwater continue to explore the beauty, menace, and fragility of the natural world and that increasingly rare species, the indivisible album on The Golden Archipelago, the band’s most absorbing and accomplished work to date. The new record is the third panel of a triptych that includes 2006’s enigmatic Palo Santo and 2008’s acclaimed Rook, albums linked by themes of environmental and personal decay and humans’ impact on nature. In The Golden Archipelago, Shearwater turn to a portrait of life on islands a world of alternating lushness and austerity, numinous silences and sudden cataclysms, and the strange flowerings of plant, animal, and human life that only arise in isolation. These are intimate subjects for songwriter Jonathan Meiburg. As a researcher, he’s camped on islands at the edges of the world, including the Falklands, Tierra del Fuego, the Galapagos, Madagascar, Nunavut, and New Zealand’s Chatham Islands, and once spent a few surreal months in a remote Aboriginal settlement in northern Australia. Adding his grandfather’s WWII experiences as a radio operator in the South Pacific to these travels gave Meiburg plenty of fodder for the songs of The Golden Archipelago, in which he weaves these times and places together with common feelings of wonder, grief, and defiance. The Golden Archipelago opens with the first strains of the anthem of Bikini Atoll, sung by Bikinians in exile on the islet of Kili, where they’ve lived since atomic tests left their Read the full story

The Riverdales are a Chicago-based band which formed in 1994 in the wake of prominent Chicago punk band Screeching Weasel. At a time when pop-punk was breaking through to the mainstream, Screeching Weasel front man Ben “Weasel” Foster elected to end the band and get back to his Ramones-based roots. Foster shared vocal and songwriter duties equally with co-frontman Dan “Vapid” Schafer (a proven frontman in his own right from his days in Sludgeworth). Foster elected to write riff-based songs with fun themes, while Schafer tempered this goofiness with catchy, oldies-themed pop songs, as well as a few goofy themes of his own.

1995 saw the band recording their self-titled debut, and touring extensively with the Mr. T Experience in smaller venues, and with Green Day in stadiums. Although a Screeching Weasel reunion put the Riverdales on the back burner for a short while, they came back strong with the phenomenal Storm the Streets in 1997, a record which saw the band hit their stride despite the fact that they had stopped performing live after the Green Day tour. After another hiatus during which Foster pursued a solo career and Schafer formed the Mopes and later the Methadones, the Riverdales released the Read the full story

Originally based out of Chicago Illinois, Screeching Weasel is best known for helping to spark the early 1990s “pop-punk” movement. Formed by a teenage Ben Weasel in 1986, the band has released 10 studio albums, two outtakes compilations and a best-of anthology. Featuring a line-up led by Weasel and longtime guitarist Danny Vapid, Screeching Weasel is again performing live after a decade-long hiatus.

http://www.myspace.com/officialscreechingweasel

http://www.screechingweasel.com/