In a better world, Dumptruck would have been heroes of the college rock boom of the 1980s -- both Seth Tiven and Kirk Swan were great songwriters, they were an impressive guitar team (when Swan left the group, Tiven also proved he could more than handle the songs by his lonesome), and they made three quite-good-to-truly-great albums between 1984 and 1988. While the edgy anxiety that fueled Dumptruck's best music wasn't that much stronger than that of the other angst merchants of the da...   [ read more ]

CD $13.28

Olga Ta±=n's continuing search for pop-crossover equilibrium again misses its mark on Sobrevivir, another ill-received pop album that resulted in a couple major hits ("Asi Es la Vida" and "No Podras") yet still angered her longtime fans, who wanted more merengue, not more pop. Past albums like Te Acordarßs de Mf (1998) and Yo por Ti (2001) had been mixed bags, interweaving tropical music with ballads and pop, but Sobrevivir isn't even a mixed bag: it's a pop alb...   [ read more ]

CD $7.58

The American Adventure is not nearly the same as the Electric Soft Parade's first. England's ESP made one of the sleeper LPs of the 2000s with their first effort, Holes in the Wall, which might easily be described for the majority over here who never heard it as a band on par with the Doves, only with more explosive tendencies, and more general bite despite the great textures. And while fans no doubt wanted, as they always do, something the same but somehow different, brothers Alex and {$...   [ read more ]

CD $44.63