Articles by Raymond Cummings

44 stories found. Showing page 1 of 3.

The Gifts That Count: The presents that have stayed in our writers' thoughts

Holiday Guide Feature | 11/18/2009 | By Raymond Cummings, Lauren Bender, Charles Cohen, Alex Epstein, John Barry

Sharp-Dressed Man By Raymond Cummings Deanna Staffo If you don't own a suit, you aren't the man who has everything. I've got mine, of course; it's hanging in the spare-room closet...[MORE]

Q&A: White Suns On Brooklyn, Noise, and Baseball

Noise | 11/13/2009 | By Raymond Cummings

Given the sulfuric dissonance, clamor, and strife present in White Suns' noise-punk tumult, it's hardly shocking that the Brooklyn trio count Sightings among their favorite bands. Performing and recor...[MORE]

Q&A: Twig Harper on Baltimore's Dreamworld Portals, Tape Loops, and the Human Instrument

Noise | 10/29/2009 | By Raymond Cummings

When we chewed the fat with sonic collagist James "Twig" Harper about his latest compositions recently, the Nautical Almanac co-captain and HereSee co-operator had a great deal to tell us-more than we...[MORE]

Know Your Product: Nuclear Power Pants, Wicked Eats the Warrior (Wham City)

Noise | 9/24/2009 | By Raymond Cummings

In the mid-1990s, Nuclear Power Pants would have been lucky to snag a third-string indie stage gig on selected Lollapalooza dates. In the late-'90s, they might've found themselves opening for the Make...[MORE]

Misdiagnosed: HEALTH's volcanic noise-pop gets a new finish

Music | 9/23/2009 | By Raymond Cummings

There's a knee-jerk tendency on the part of some musicians to avoid their own press-especially the potshots. But ask HEALTH singer/guitarist Jake Duzsik to single out what he sees as the weirdest ...[MORE]

Q & A: Jessica Hopper: A conversation with the music writer, This American Life consultant and author of The Girls' Guide to Rocking

Books | 8/19/2009 | By Raymond Cummings

A music writer whose bylines have appeared everywhere from Spin to the Chicago Tribune, Renaissance woman Jessica Hopper is also a music consultant for This American Life and has logged serious ti...[MORE]

Q&A: Lizzie Bougatsos of Gang Gang Dance

Noise | 8/5/2009 | By Raymond Cummings

Listening to Gang Gang Dance often feels like drowning in a flood of mysticism: exotic instrumentation trickling down on synth flutterings and dense, bent percussion of both the electronic and organic...[MORE]

Know Your Product: Creepy Murdle, The Little Things That Kill You (MT6)

Noise | 7/16/2009 | By Raymond Cummings

Baltimore's Creepy Murdle—bassist Anne Feinstein; her husband, guitarist/snarler Rich Feinstein; and drummer Clay Holland—might be MT6 Records' most accessible signees yet. Sure, their mac...[MORE]

Q & A: Dag Rosenqvist of Jasper TX

Noise | 7/10/2009 | By Raymond Cummings

Almost as a rule, we don't expect weavers of mercilessly dark, navel-gazing music to be forthcoming about either their craft or themselves. So we were shocked, during an e-mail exchange with Jasper TX...[MORE]

I Hear A Darkness: Sweden's Jasper TX inks his own twilight netherworld

Music | 7/8/2009 | By Raymond Cummings

The self-released Pilgrims--one of several recordings Swedish multi-instrumentalist Dag Rosenqvist issued under the Jasper TX banner in 2007--concludes with a dirge named "A Quiet Gloom." Faded br...[MORE]

Q&A: Eric Copeland of Black Dice

Noise | 6/10/2009 | By Raymond Cummings

NYC trio Black Dice doesn't so much make music as it dumpster-dives for sonic refuse, smashes together its findings, and shapes the shards and fragments into disarmingly odd, wobbly sculptures. Liste...[MORE]

Dazed, But Not So Strange: The Strange Boys get ahead by getting familiar

Music | 6/10/2009 | By Raymond Cummings

Where youth and musical indoctrination go hand-in-hand--the pressure cooker of hormones and close proximity operating at full intensity--amazing things can happen: think Black Rebel Motorcycle Club,...[MORE]

Know Your Product: Ear Pwr, Super Animal Brothers III (Carpark)

Noise | 5/14/2009 | By Raymond Cummings

If a pop-techno album ever warranted its own Surgeon General's warning, Super Animal Brothers III is it. Something along the lines of: "This disc contains high does of sacharrine and obnoxious cutenes...[MORE]

Big Rock Candy Mountain Man: Kevin Rudolf is the latest in a long string of semi-charmed, self-impressed white guys

Music | 5/6/2009 | By Raymond Cummings

The prevailing mood on the mountaintop is one of righteousness, most awesome and triumphant. Rarified air crackles with expectant electricity as a storm gathers out of the ether: a tauntingly addicti...[MORE]

Endorphin Rush: The Pains of Being Pure at Heart make going down on the upside new all over again

Music | 4/29/2009 | By Raymond Cummings

When pop-based indie-rock is able to transform life's trials and tribulations into hummable comfort food, it's doing something very, very right. This is why graying hipsters hold out hope for a Smiths...[MORE]

Q&A: Sonic Suicide Squad

Noise | 4/15/2009 | By Raymond Cummings

Listening to Washington, D.C./New Jersey trio Sonic Suicide Squad is comparable to watching naturalists attempt to ensnare sharks, cougars, or grizzly bears for scientific or educational purposes. The...[MORE]

Reassessing Success: Kenny Tompkins' side hustle hasn't spoiled him yet

Music | 3/25/2009 | By Raymond Cummings

Walk Like A Human--the Christmas Lights' debut full-length, released last June on Pro-Gravity Records--might have arrived eight or nine months too early. The difficulty of staying optimistic about a...[MORE]

Q&A: Wavves' Nathan Williams

Noise | 3/24/2009 | By Raymond Cummings

Nathan Williams' passport is getting a serious workout these days. February and March found the 22-year old San Diego resident and Wavves nucleus blazing a whirlwind noise-pop path through Europe, hit...[MORE]

Who Wants To Be An MT6 Recording Artist?

Noise | 3/5/2009 | By Raymond Cummings

The taut, tense guitars lash out with gut jabs and, with the drums slamming along in time, it's as though the instruments have been coiled and waiting forever for their chance to strike. Yet now that ...[MORE]

Ben Folds: Still Fighting the Battle of Who Could Care Less

Noise | 2/12/2009 | By Raymond Cummings

The annals of rock history don't want for passionately perturbed malcontents who punt from and perch precariously upon piano stools--Tori Amos, Elton John, Alicia Keys, and that dude from OneRepublic ...[MORE]

44 stories found. Showing page 1 of 3.

142 reviews found. Showing page 1 of 8.

MT6 Records

Musician review: by Raymond Cummings | 11/11/2009

Ask Alex Strama where MT6 Records--the local label he and wife Amanda have operated for 11 years--fits into Baltimore music, and you might be surprised by his answer. "Nowhere, I guess," Strama mu...[MORE]

Free: The Future of a Radical Price

Book review: by Raymond Cummings | 10/28/2009

Free sells. That statement is at once oxymoronic and intuitively true: It's inconceivable that giving stuff away can generate significant revenues, but the promise of gratis goods or services is an ir...[MORE]

Twig Harper

Musician review: by Raymond Cummings | 10/14/2009

When discussing the unconventionally recombinant music he creates, James "Twig" Harper drifts into New Age-y abstractions, referencing different levels of consciousness and perception the way most m...[MORE]

Husbands

Record review: by Raymond Cummings | 10/14/2009

A consummate headphones record, Husbands is the latest in a long string of recent releases that linger suggestively at the intersection of straight ambient atmospherics, bombed-out noise, and blissed-...[MORE]

Cruel and Unusual: The Culture of Punishment in America

Book review: by Raymond Cummings | 6/24/2009

Roosevelt University Assistant Professor Anne-Marie Cusac's excellent examination of punishment returns time and again to the notion of "punishment creep." "Punishment creep" occurs when new punitiv...[MORE]

MT6 Island

Record review: by Raymond Cummings | 4/8/2009

"Yo, this raccoon ate our potato rolls," one dude complains to another. "What's up with that?" his companion asks, mock-incredulously, before both dudes launch wholeheartedly into the sort of primal,...[MORE]

The Proper Sex

Record review: by Raymond Cummings | 3/25/2009

As frontwoman for NYC world-pop dervish Gang Gang Dance, Lizzi Bougatsos brings considerable powers to bear. On stage, she's a shimmying study in captivated allure: a postpunk minx vibing out on the g...[MORE]

Holding Pattern: Stories

Book review: by Raymond Cummings | 2/11/2009

By Jeffery Renard Allen Graywolf Press, paperback "Blunt snapped her umbrella open to ward off the sun. He moved under its shade and watched Blunt, her false teeth as bright as cell bars, dead person'...[MORE]

Let Sleeping Corpses Lie

Record review: by Raymond Cummings | 12/17/2008

Zombie-come-latelies might not know this, but before he was considered a third-rate George Romero, Rob Zombie was considered a third-rate Al Jourgensen. In its four-disc, one-DVD retrospective sweep,...[MORE]

Bad Liquor Pond

Musician review: by Raymond Cummings | 1/14/2009

You heard it here first, folks: Dave Gibson for President, 2012. Everyone's weary of election-zone mainstream media equivocations, but Gibson is the kind of guy you'd like to kill a six-pack with: th...[MORE]

The FiF, Odd Girl Out with Laredo, Savagemill, Vespertine Movement

Event Preview review: by Raymond Cummings | 1/7/2009

Boys. Boys. Boys! Good luck escaping 'em; just about any musical genre you care to name is a sausage party. So estrogen-charged rock bands with chum-baited hooks, nasty punk chops, and sharpened lipst...[MORE]

Death With Interruptions

Book review: by Raymond Cummings | 12/17/2008

As a literary genre, magical realism abhors mass specificity. Best to keep things fairly vague; all the better to present the story as a fable or allegory. Jose Saramago--Nobel Prize for Literature-wi...[MORE]

You'll Never Play This Town Again

Record review: by Raymond Cummings | 11/19/2008

From its formation in 1992 until its 1997 split, Miami scuzz trio Harry Pussy--guitarists Bill Orcutt and Dan Hosker, alongside screamer/drummer Adris Hoyos--practiced a particularly pithy, violent fo...[MORE]

World I See

Record review: by Raymond Cummings | 10/29/2008

If you weren't aware that New York producer/musician Rusty Santos had helmed discs from all manner of New Weird American outfits--White Magic, Born Ruffians, Panda Bear, and Animal Collective among t...[MORE]

Queens Die Proudly

Record review: by Raymond Cummings | 10/29/2008

"Queens Die Proudly" hits like keyboard-stand Armageddon, convulsing synthesizer divisions recoiling from just-escaped-a-nightmare mumbo jumbo like "In the morning with sun on to terrorize me/ In the...[MORE]

High Places

Record review: by Raymond Cummings | 10/22/2008

Headphone-equipped adventurers returning from preliminary hikes to High Places may report a bafflement similar to the one that greeted M.I.A.'s Arular before that album had an opportunity to really r...[MORE]

03/07-09/07

Record review: by Raymond Cummings | 10/22/2008

Sol-Angel and the Hadley St. Dreams

Record review: by Raymond Cummings | 9/24/2008

If there's one thing Solange Knowles hopes listeners take away from Sol-Angel and the Hadley St. Dreams, it's this: She isn't her older, hitched-to-Jay-Z sister. Showbiz hopefuls making a concerted e...[MORE]

Take Me to The Sea

Record review: by Raymond Cummings | 8/27/2008

Johnny Whitney may be in possession of the most distinctive voice in contemporary indie rock--a near-hysterical, helium-injected falsetto that seems to portend Armageddon's swift approach. His inimit...[MORE]

Certainty of Swarms

Record review: by Raymond Cummings | 8/20/2008

Kentucky's Hair Police are frequently lumped in with the so-called modern noise vanguard of Wolf Eyes, Yellow Swans, and Sightings. Yet Mike Connelly, Robert Beatty, and Trevor Tremaine haven't fully...[MORE]