Recent The Cut-Out Bin Features

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Wednesday, June 10 2009

Wheat: Medeiros / Hope and Adams

By Jer Fairall

It would be tremendously heartening to view the Rebel Group's reissues of these albums as a corrective measure to the attention and praise that eluded them at the time.

Thursday, September 25 2008

The Misfits’ American Psycho (1997)

By James Greene, Jr.

This Danzig-less "reunion" album from the most recognized brand in horror rock isn't nearly as bad as you'd expect.

Friday, April 4 2008

Judgment Night: Music from the Motion Picture (1993)

By James Greene, Jr.

A look at the album that may have spawned rap rock and that supplies the missing link between Biohazard and Emilio Estevez.

Thursday, March 27 2008

Youngblood Brass Band: Center:Level:Roar

By Thomas Hauner

As a new generation continues to reshape traditional ensembles from big band to chamber and play it punk by adopting pop, it's useful to go back and marvel at one of the albums that truly innovated in this new-jack band geek era.

Thursday, March 6 2008

Marillion, Afraid of Sunlight

By Bob Short

Having made a name as prog-rock revivalists in the '80s, Marillion then lost its singer and slid slowly into semi-obscurity, the band responded with a dark album that assessed the fallout of fame.

Thursday, February 28 2008

Souled American,  Around the Horn (1990)

By Zach Schonfeld

Chicago’s Souled American's album, Around the Horn, may be the most uniquely beautiful alt-country album you’ve never heard.

Thursday, January 31 2008

Al Kooper, New York City (You’re a Woman) (1971)

By Rob Horning

This album features some of the best of Kooper's original compositions and is free of his tendency to include reinterpretations of over-familiar songs.

Thursday, January 3 2008

Mojo Nixon & Skid Roper, Bo-Day-Shus!!! (1987)

By James Greene Jr.

Two decades later, Bo-Day-Shus!!! stands as the ultimate musical document of America's '80s love affair with redneck culture.

Friday, October 19 2007

Monty Python’s Matching Tie and Handkerchief

By D.M. Edwards

Humor is a funny thing. Here to prove it are three Monty Python albums, revealing the revolutionary constructs of their work, the dangers of self-parody, and, well, something completely different.

Friday, October 5 2007

Losing California

By Rob Horning

After the Mamas and the Papas, unheralded songwriter John Phillips released one perfect solo album before disintegrating into addiction and self-recrimination.

Wednesday, October 3 2007

Fire Engines: Hungry Beat

By Jennifer Kelly

Cowbell-crazed, no-wave noised, robot-funk grooves from the short-lived Scottish band best known for inspiring Franz Ferdinand. Even the most cursory listen provides that they were much, much more interesting than that.

Wednesday, September 12 2007

Reg King: Reg King

By Doug Sheppard

One of the great lost '60s pop and soul also-rans, Reg King's only solo album is a murky snapshot of the dissolution of musical promise as an industry rolled on by, but remains a rawly emotional experience.

Friday, August 24 2007

Howard Devoto: Jerky Versions of The Dream

By D.M. Edwards

Erudite perspectives on the romantic dream from a shape-shifting man-insect who left punk before we knew it existed. Awkwardness has never sounded so varied, cinematic, stupid and sexual.

Thursday, August 9 2007

Alice Cooper, Love It to Death

By Paul Pearson

Love It to Death is the beginning of Alice Cooper as we know him, with his storytelling bent and Ezrin's drapes of the epic. From there Cooper got more external about the nature of evil in his stage shows and symbols.

Thursday, August 2 2007

Robyn Hitchcock: Storefront Hitchcock / Jewels for Sophia

By Michael Keefe

These reissues of two late '90s Robyn Hitchcock albums find the surrealist singer-songwriter in prime form.

Wednesday, July 25 2007

Karen Dalton: In My Own Time

By Terry Sawyer

Just as the ambiguous details surrounding Nick Drake's death led people to exhaustively make his sorrow sacred, Karen Dalton was soul country's undiscovered Ophelia.

Friday, June 22 2007

Hall & Oates, Abandoned Luncheonette (1973)

By Rob Horning

Before their string of ubiquitous 1980s hits, this songwriting duo wrote surprisingly strange and pleasantly unpretentious soft rock.

Friday, June 15 2007

The Only Ones, Special View (1979)

By Julia Yepes

The Only Ones' Peter Perrett was power pop's Baudelaire, assailing city life with delirious, love-struck curses.

Friday, June 8 2007

Boz Scaggs, Silk Degrees (1976)

By Paul Pearson

The former Steve Miller Band sideman teams up with the musicians who would become Toto to enact the birth of the smooth.

Friday, October 13 2006

The Beach Boys, Love You (1977)

By Rob Horning

Essentially a Brian Wilson solo effort, on which the ravaged, troubled genius takes a few more painful steps toward a purifying simplicity.

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