The early-’90s alternative-rock “revolution” is far enough in our collective rearview mirror for nostalgia to have set in. And here we have a couple of potential beneficiaries, two bands that had brushes with the mainstream before fading out — Meat Puppets as cameo stars of Nirvana’s 1994 swan song Unplugged, Buffalo Tom with the song [...]

During Let’s Active’s mid-1980s heyday, critics dropped adjectives such as “winsome,” “jangly” and “cute” to describe the band’s music. Dynamico, Let’s Active mastermind Mitch Easter’s first album since the waning days of the Reagan administration, should inspire no such descriptors. While Easter still cranks out the hooks, catchy as ever, Dynamico is undeniably a rock [...]

Back in Mott The Hoople’s day, you never would’ve picked frontman Ian Hunter as a candidate to age gracefully. Improbably, he has done just that, perhaps because he was always a bit older than his peers. Hunter’s actual year of birth has long been a matter of dispute, with most accounts putting it somewhere between [...]

If Cary Hudson’s electrified 2004 release Cool Breeze recalled one aspect of Mississippi — the amped-up blues-rock of the North Mississippi All-Stars, minus the sprawling jams — the pared-down acoustic ruminations of Bittersweet Blues bring to mind the Mississippi of William Faulkner and Eudora Welty. There’s a writerly, descriptive feel to the former Blue Mountain [...]

Elvis Perkins’ debut album comes with enough back-story to overwhelm a lesser talent. He bears a striking resemblance to his late father, actor Anthony Perkins, who died of AIDS on September 12, 1992; and his mother, photographer Berry Berenson, was on the plane that hit the World Trade Center’s North Tower on September 11, 2001. [...]

Piano is Flat Duo Jets leader/Mozart fan Dexter Romweber’s version of classical music for short attention spans: thirteen disjointed tracks of melodramatic keyboard flourishes in less than 28 minutes. A Cliff’s Notes version of Rachmaninoff or Dvorak, it sounds like soundtrack music to an old silent film, played by Bugs Bunny decked out in a [...]

Robyn Hitchcock just wasn’t cut out for this dimension, which might be distressing if he himself didn’t seem so good-natured about his lot. In the late, great Syd Barrett’s absence, Hitchcock has this particular quadrant of the astral plane all to himself. He makes good use of it on Ole! Tarantula, his return to rockin’ [...]

Parenthood is great and all, but there are still times when you want to hire a babysitter, dress up nice and hit the town like you used to. So it is with Sara Hickman, returning to the world of grown-up music after an extended sabbatical making children’s records. Based on this ambitious two-disc concept album [...]