Marc Hirsh
Marc Hirsh lives in the Boston area, where he indulges in the magic trinity of improv comedy, competitive adult four square and music journalism. He has won trophies for one of these, but refuses to say which.
He writes for the Boston Globe and has also been spotted on MSNBC and in the pages of Amplifier, the Nashville Scene, the Baltimore City Paper and Space City Rock, where he is the co-publisher and managing editor.
He once danced onstage with The Flaming Lips while dressed as a giant frog. It was very warm.
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We pause to remember Leslie Nielsen, an actor who knew very well that his job wasn't to say funny things or say things in a funny way -- but who managed to be riotously funny anyway.
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He may seem tentative in "Pieces," but Villagers' Conor O'Brien knows exactly what he's doing. It's not a linear climb to the howling orchestral sweep at the end of the song, but a constant renegotiation of how much to give away.
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"Bring Night" finds the Australian singer coming as close as she'll probably ever come to emulating Kelly Clarkson. Driven by a guitar that keeps time with a steady simmer of percussive clicks, the song combines the hookiest aspects of Clarkson's best work.
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On her new collection of British rock covers, the soul singer takes a George Harrison song, "Isn't It a Pity," and brings out its transcendent serenity. LaVette was schooled in the tradition of soul music, and her restraint can't disguise the fact that she's heartbroken over humankind's inability to learn from its mistakes.
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"Voicething" turns out to be one of Goldfrapp's most organic moments, warmly enveloping rather than cool to the touch. The clipped swells at the start mimic respiration, and the steady pulse of the bass takes the place of a heartbeat, but soon comes the actual breath of Goldfrapp herself to elevate the song beyond a simple replication of a living thing.
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Joining forces as their individual careers are chugging along, The Living Sisters' Inara George, Eleni Mandell and Becky Stark are like a distaff quirk-pop Crosby, Stills and Nash. The most gorgeous song on a debut album full of them, "This Mountain Has Skies" is an achingly slow Western waltz that evokes the wide-open geography and clear air of its lyric.
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The former singer of New Buffalo, Seltmann does what all good musicians do: namely, take familiar parts and transform them into something new. What's most novel about "Harmony to My Heartbeat," as least compared to the sources that seemed to inspire it, is its shift to a grownup perspective.
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"Caught In The Crowd" plays like the other side of Janis Ian's "At Seventeen" -- it's a clear-eyed portrait of a teenager who, confronted with a decision, made precisely the wrong one and feels pangs of regret to this day.
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"Devil in You" seems to stop and start constantly, lurching forward from bar to bar. It swings as though it's supposed to be a secret, like there's a hidden shuffle that can't be heard, only felt. The momentum generated is enough to sustain the song far longer than the three and a quarter minutes it lasts.
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Where the singer's voice was once a heavy-lidded murmur, in "The Blackest Lily" it comes off as languid and sensual, giving a frisky undercurrent to the admission, "I was a creature of appetites."