First, let’s say so me thing good so this article can say something at all: The Passing Strange soundtrack, the Repo! The Genetic Opera soundtrack, Joe Jackson’s Rain, Electric Six’s Flash, that self-titled one from Wreckless Eric and Amy Rigby, Black Mountain’s In The Future, Murder By Death’s Red of Tooth and Claw, Alice Cooper’s Along Came A Spider, and…well, there was the Forgetting Sarah Marshall soundtrack. It’d be nice to have an entire album of songs from those puppet vampires in the movie. Anyway, that’s at least 10 good albums for 2008. As usual, though, the music press tried to convince gullible readers that there were plenty more out there. The misinformation campaign covered the typical darlings of indie finds, established acts and aging favorites. Here are the year’s worst—although, in their defense, none of these albums were more inept than the positive reviews they garnered: Read more Read it in print

WHAT DO YOU get when you combine punk rock,Vaudeville cabaret, modern technology and a greatly misunderstood character actor from America’s golden age of film? Everyone agrees:You get a bad idea. Specifically you get Addicted to Bad Ideas: Peter Lorre’s 20th Century. Conceived as “a hybrid punk rock multi-media theater event,” the piece presents Lorre’s dramatic life story through music, video, costume and the occasional mosh pit. If the music sounds familiar, it’s because the show’s composer, the World Inferno Friendship Society, has been crowding New York stages for years with rousing orchestral freak-outs. An already theatrical rock group, it has now taken teamed up with director Jay Scheib and arKtype producer Thomas O. Kriegsmann to create a one night-only spectacle to be performed at Webster Hall on Jan. 9. Appearing with the group is drummer Brian Viglione, a fitting choice, considering he helped spark the early aughties’ explosion of cabaret-punk acts in his role as Weimar heartthrob and drummer in Boston-bred sensation The Dresden Dolls. Read more Read it in print

IT ISN’T UNCOMMON to be let down by something that comes along calling itself “opera,” only to find out that it either has nothing at all to do with opera, or that it’s basically a musical. (For the layman, musical theater would generally fall under the “theater” industry, while opera is classical music’s territory; there are some exceptions, but generally, that’s how it plays out). No doubt, opera’s marginal status in popular culture has let much of this lame, ironic or even erroneous labeling go on unchecked. But the Portland, Ore.–based Vagabond Opera, arriving next week to the Zipper Factory in a hail of sepia and song, actually lives up to its name. Founded six years ago by frontman Eric Stern,Vagabond Opera has been bringing a richly diverse, if distinctly zany, mix of operatic cabaret to musical venues of all kinds both in and outside the United States, straddling genres and doing some serious singing while they’re at it. The six-piece ensemble (which includes violin, musical saw, accordion, sax, cello, bass and percussion and several vocals) presents songs in 12 languages, and in musical traditions ranging from opera and cabaret, to klezmer Read more Read it in print

AMONG THE MANY talented artists from around the globe that make up the sixth edition of GlobalFest—New York’s largest world music showcase, which takes place at Webster Hall every January— is Brooklyn’s own Chicha Libre, a band put together by Olivier Conan (one of the coowners of Barbès in Park Slope) as a way to spread chicha, a psychedelic musical genre he discovered almost by chance while traveling in South America. “It all began when I went to Peru a few years back on vacation, looking for music, and people started telling me about chicha, which I had never heard of before, so I started buying a lot of that music and brought it back here and started Chicha Libre just as an exercise in playing the music that I liked,” Conan tells me. “But it turned into one very quickly, so [the band] just began playing more, adding more to the repertoire, writing some of our own stuff and covering music mostly out of the chicha realm but doing it in the way that would have the same approach that the original chicha guys were doing.” Read more Read it in print

JEREMY BARNES HAS no greater passion, at least from a musical standpoint, than Eastern European folk. During our conversation, Barnes uses the word “love” more than half a dozen times to describe the intensity of his feeling for the region’s fervent, dizzyingly passionate sounds. But Barnes (who made his name originally as the drummer for one of indie folk’s most lauded bands, Neutral Milk Hotel, and brings his duo A Hawk and a Hacksaw to town this week) became an ardent fan long before his fellow lovers of socalled gypsy music in Beirut, Gogol Bordello and Devotchka gained a following. Barnes first heard Bulgarian women’s choirs while driving through West Texas in 1996 on a tour when he was 19, and he was hooked. He moved to Hungary two years ago to live among and learn from some of the area’s masters but has always sought to interpret traditional styles through the contemporary lens of his American background. Read more Read it in print

It's no mystery why Glasvegas is so popular in the U.K.The Glasgowbased foursome’s songs have the brooding, catchy sound that has launched a thousand NME covers (in fact, the band was named 2008’s most promising new band by the British music mag), but what remains to be seen is if the band’s punktinged gloom will catch on here. The last time the band swung through town it played the Mercury Lounge, but that was before the big push: posters in the Virgin Megastore (where the band will play an in-store on Jan. 5), planned appearances on late-night talk shows and mentions in glossy magazines to sell the self-titled debut record coming out next week. On Jan. 6, Glasvegas will play a sold-out show at the Bowery Ballroom, part of a U.S. tour that will give the band its chance for stardom on both sides of the Atlantic. Read more Read it in print

After shaking hands, I sat down and clicked on my tape recorder, a Sony Clear Voice Plus, I had bought at Staples two hours earlier. I had no questions prepared, just my beer and my courage.We started talking about his life growing up in the woods of New Hampshire and how he got to this point, getting ready to tour behind his first solo album. Read more Read it in print

Matisyahu was hardly expected to make it this far. In 2005, when he blew up after performing at Bonnaroo music festival, critics expected the novelty of a Hasidic reggae rapper to burn out after a year or so. But, like the spot of holy oil that flared on for eight days and nights to create the miracle of Hanukkah, Matisyahu surprised them all by hanging around year after year. His Festival of Light concert series, which opened this Sunday at Webster Hall, is now in its third revolution. Read more Read it in print

Kimya Dawson Gave birth to her daughter, Panda Delilah, in July 2006, but Dawson had motherly qualities long before she had offspring of her own.The 36-year-old, born in Newark, New Jersey, and raised in Bedford Hills, New York, grew up in a house that doubled as a daycare center, worked as a camp counselor for kids and has a younger brother. Read more Read it in print

Dear Mark, The guy I’m seeing told me from the get-go that he wanted to take things slow because he’s been in serious relationships, one after the other, for years. Of course we have moved along at the pace of a 747. The thing is it’s fun and I really, really like him. Should I slow things down to keep him from repeating his pattern or just enjoy what seems to be the beginning of a great romance? Read more Read it in print