Album Review: Fanfarlo – Let’s Go Extinct

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Rating: Bronze+
On their third full length, Let’s Go Extinct, London’s Fanfarlo deliver their most ambitious and yet most distant and uneven album to date. Though the album is well produced and performed to perfection, the music falls flat due to Fanfarlo’s reluctance to take the risks necessary to set them apart in a crowded genre. This seems like a paradox when the band is taking on bigger themes with even bigger production, but for all the grandeur at the surface, there are no new or imaginative takes on the genre nor is there any genre defining moment that would solidify Fanfarlo as an important part of the Baroque pop scene. Instead, the album bogged down by mediocre songs and overwrought imagery. That’s not to say the album lacks imagination or is devoid of musical highlights; it’s just that the album, as a whole, fails to deliver upon its ambitious promises.

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Show Review: Fanfarlo at Great American Music Hall, 2/22/10

Fanfarlo entertaining a loving crowd.

Fanfarlo wants you to know that they are not nerds.  I‘m sitting with them in their supremely messy dressing room after their show to a packed audience at the Great American Music Hall while they go through press clippings from the local weekly papers.  “It’s all because Justin used to work at a bookstore and all he’d talk about was books,” Cathy the mandolin/violin player announces.  “We’re really not that bookish.”  When the cooler of drinks is empty, we migrate to the Hemlock before they have to wake up early to fly to Portland. Continue reading “Show Review: Fanfarlo at Great American Music Hall, 2/22/10”

Spinning Platters Weekly Guide to Bay Area Concerts, 2/17/10-2/23/10

Sharing a bill with Visqueen & 311 in Santa Cruz caused this goat to faint.
Playing at the Catalyst this Monday night.

As we warm up to the upcoming Noise Pop Festival, here’s a few shows to let you warm up your earplugs with.

Continue reading “Spinning Platters Weekly Guide to Bay Area Concerts, 2/17/10-2/23/10”

Album Review: Jeremy Warmsley – How We Became

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How We Became is the album everyone forgot to notice when it came out last fall.  Then again, the only people that could have noticed it live in England.  America, I present to you the Jeremy Warmsley.

I stumbled upon Jeremy Warmsley on my quest to go through as many Blogotheque take-away shows as possible.  There Jeremy Warmsley was hidden, gangly and unassuming in front of a church, armed only with his acoustic guitar and his warbley voice.  I was smitten.  And so I found my way to How We Became. Continue reading “Album Review: Jeremy Warmsley — How We Became”