CD Reviews

It’s been three years since we’ve heard new music from Blue Largo. The wait ended this month with the release of Before the Devil Steals Your Soul. Eric Lieberman and Alicia Aragon have assembled a talent-rich rhythm section from the wealth of Southern Californian artistry and the outcome is stellar. Of the 15 tracks, there […]

Chris Avetta is a local pop singer/songwriter whose debut album is Shadows. The independent release refers to her sound as indie-folk and forest-pop, and the slickly produced disc boasts eight LA-area studio musicians adding layer upon layer to those provided by the five string and keyboard instruments played by Avetta, who also sings her own […]

Sometimes Julie broke through a few years back with a full-length CD, Head First; the band, featuring powerful vocalist Monica Sorenson, played songs with a classic rock feel. They moved to a harder rocking edge on Bright Side of the Line and are back with a new EP, Breaking, rocking hard as ever. This seven-tune […]

With Tasty Tunes, Ira B. Liss proves that the big band survives well into the 21st century and, at least under his leadership, is thriving in inspiration and creativity. Big band music is sometimes wrongly thought of as a dinosaur of the jazz idiom, having run its course sometime in the mid 1950s. While it […]

San Diego-based guitar virtuoso Peter Sprague has been involved in a rich dialog with string players of a classical persuasion for many years now, and this conversation bears significant fruit on his latest release, Samba Andaluza, a trio featuring violinist Bridget Dolkas and cellist Lars Hoefs, both members of his expanded Peter Sprague String Consort. […]

Nitro Express is not only a brand of shotgun cartridges, but is a local roots band active from the 1990s to present. Their CD Country Style is something different, recorded in a day over 20 years ago with pre-digital equipment, never remixed, and rescued from oblivion this year by Jim “Nitro” Pulsifer. Unable to remix, […]

Whitney Shay has been tearing up the stages of San Diego for quite a few years now, the petite and elegant songstress applying her impressive pipes to a variety of musical styles in a multitude of collaborations. Show tunes, torch songs, ballads, classic rock ‘n’ roll, and soul, and blues are only some the styles […]

Jackslacks is Chris Georgio, and he has been around the San Diego roots scene for long enough to have been part of Hot Rod Lincoln, Dead Engines, and a founding member of the Forbidden Pigs. He became the namesake of his band early last decade and their CDs have included Rock & Roll Dinosaur, Lucky […]

The reclusive and creative magician/ composer Joe Garrison continues to toil away at his art, yet he has the distinctive advantage of bettering himself with every effort. Just when one thinks one has heard him at his best—well, along comes The Broken Jar, which to these ears comes awfully close to a masterpiece statement. This […]