Posts From Steven Mirkin

Dream Syndicate: Majestic, Loud, Noisy, Fun, Alive

They came roaring back with the kind of majestic, loud, noisy, fun, alive show that would be impressive from a band half their age.

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Review: The New Bio That Jann Wenner Hates

It’s “an ambitious, dishy, well-written biography, with a backstory worthy of its subject.” So why is the Rolling Stone magazine founder so unhappy with it?

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Lou Reed ‘A Life’: An Exemplary Biography

“The Lou Reed that inhabits this book is powerfully drawn, from moment to moment deeply appealing and appalling,” says our reviewer.

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So Many Roads Brings The Grateful Dead Into Sharp Focus

In So Many Roads author David Browne delves into the “long strange trip” of the Grateful Dead and makes sense of it all in a “smart & satisfying” band bio

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Viv Albertine’s ‘Fascinating’ Punk Rock Memoir

Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys by Viv Albertine (Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press) In A Word: Unsparing If you were a fan of the Slits and their sui generis, serrated, feral music, it should come as

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Wilco Brings Back (Some of) the Fun

Rather than making an album with the implied stature of “masterpiece” etched into its grooves, Wilco keeps it short, snappy and fun on its ninth studio LP, yet without forsaking the experinentalism that has been the band’s hallmark since Yankee Foxtrot Hotel.

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Jorma Kaukonen Offers Old School Acoustic

50 years since he blazed a psychedelic trail with the Airplane + decades since he + Jack Cassidy formed Hot Tuna, he’s happy to kick back and pick + sing

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Kate Pierson Echoes B-52’s on Solo Debut

Guitars and Microphones is a slightly smoothed over version of the B-52’s kitschy mix of surf, girl group and dance party sounds

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Newcomer Courtney Barnett Rocks

The “impressively assured debut album by the 27-year-old Australian singer-songwriter Courtney Barnett grabs you by the lapels and insists you hear what she has to say.”

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