Spinning Platters Presents The Official List of the Top 20 Albums of 2012

Here to present the top 20 albums of the year as voted on by the SpinningPlatters staff.
Here to present the top 20 albums of the year as voted on by the SpinningPlatters staff.

By The Spinning Platters Staff

Every website has a Top XX albums of the year list. This one is ours, and there is nothing by The xx on it. I mean, I really like The xx’s Coexist. There were just 20 records that came out this year that were better. Maybe you’ll find something that you missed?

Continue reading “Spinning Platters Presents The Official List of the Top 20 Albums of 2012”

Show Review: David Byrne & St. Vincent at the Orpheum Theatre, 10/15/2012

David Byrne, St. Vincent, and accompaniment
David Byrne, St. Vincent, and accompaniment

The term “supergroup” is often used to refer to a set of musicians who are best known in association with their respective bands — musicians who haven’t necessarily operated as solitary acts in their own right, and are culled together to see what their individual untapped energies will create when synthesized. By contrast, when speaking of a pair of artists that write and perform together, each possessing their own prolific solo careers, the relationship is usually defined — accurately, but less overtly bombastically — as a “collaboration” between them. It should be preemptively stated, therefore, that the “collaboration” between David Byrne, former founder and frontman of world-famous new-wave-art-rockers Talking Heads, and Annie Clark, better known as the gorgeously cacophonous St. Vincent, possesses all of the grandeur and might that the term “supergroup” conjures the image of. Backed by a seven-piece horn section, sampling engineer, and percussionist, Byrne and Clark have birthed one of the most unusual but compelling albums of 2012, a 45-minute opus titled Love This Giant, and the Orpheum Theatre, best known as a host of many musicals and plays from all eras and countries, offered its stage to the pair for the San Francisco stop on their tour.

Continue reading “Show Review: David Byrne & St. Vincent at the Orpheum Theatre, 10/15/2012”