Music

Over the past half-decade, Brandi Carlile has rightfully earned a seat in the highest echelon of contemporary singer songwriters, mostly through the folk rock mastery she displayed on 2009's Give Up the Ghost. Her studio records have been impressive, but it seems that this album – recorded live with the Seattle Symphony at the gorgeous Benaroya Hall – is the disc that those new to Carlile should give a listen to.

Paul Simon, Velvet Underground and Blind Willie McTell covers on the same album… you don't hear that every day. But then again, maybe you're just not listening to enough G. Love, a guy who has managed to mash Bob Dylan, Delta blues and hip-hop throughout most of his career. He is nothing if not eclectic – and on his new album, Fixin' to Die, he's still beguilingly surprising.
For this outing, the Philadelphia-born artist (real name Garrett Dutton) decided to go back to his roots – far back to the days before he began merging blues-folk with a little R&B and hip-hop to create a laid-back, funk-soul vibe. Even before he hooked up with his band, Special Sauce, or did his first recordings for the Okeh label or landed on pal Jack Johnson's Brushfire Records. For his first album billed only as G. Love, he invited Americana darlings, the Avett Brothers, to produce and perform; they bonded after meeting in Boston.

Sometimes your favorite bands break up too early. And sometimes the members of those bands go on to other projects, other bands and make other albums. And you're likely disappointed. Then there's Andrew Carroll, whose delectably poppy indie-rock band, You Me & Iowa, parted ways two years ago, despite a pair of solid, sonically advanced LPs, leaving him out on his own for the first time in six years.

Sometimes you can hear the sound of the freeway from inside Gregory Alan Isakov's house. The noise of the Boulder, Colorado, traffic seeps through the walls – not a lot, but just enough – and that can be a problem when the singer songwriter is at work laying down the tracks for his next album.
Isakov has never been one for recording studios, opting rather to record and produce his albums mostly on his own, with some help from friends, typically right in his own his home, even if that means forgoing the luxury of soundproof walls. But in the mornings, the buzz of vehicles is low enough when he rolls out of bed and makes his way to the nest of wires and cables that inhabit his home during recording time to allow him to lay down some of his delicate, heartfelt folk numbers, which we heard on 2009's excellent Empty Northern

The boys of the Strokes are men now. But their most recent album, Angles, will leave you wishing for the gritty scruffiness of their younger years. Back in 2001, the young New York garage rockers blindsided listeners with Is This It? and again in 2003 with Room on Fire. As twenty-somethings, the Strokes were revivalists griming up the music that they loved.