Tell somebody from the year 2003 that the producer half of Lex Records cult-rap act DM & Jemini would team up with the recently solo Goodie Mob alumni CeeLo for one of the decade's most definitive singles, and they'd think you were out of your mind. Tell somebody from the year 2006 that the song feels like a lucky yet brief radar blip in the midst of two wildly diverging musical careers, and they'd...
Keith Emerson, the English musician best known as keyboardist for prog-rock titans Emerson, Lake & Palmer, has died at age 71. Emerson's bandmates confirmed his death via Facebook, stating that he died at home in Santa Monica. Emerson was born in Todmorden, Yorkshire in 1944 and returned with his family to Worthing, West Sussex after the conclusion of World War II. He studied classical music growing...
So yeah, there's really no other way to say it: Macklemore both owns and proudly displays an oil painting of a nude, syruped up Justin Bieber with a pancake on his dick, as Vulture reports. This revelation comes courtesy of writer Jonah Weiner, who took a tour of Macklemore and Ryan Lewis' Seattle studio for a recent Rolling Stone profile: On the ground floor is a recording room with a ton of audio...
It can't be easy to get your head around the idea that so many of the people who came to see your band one night were killed for it. And Eagles Of Death Metal frontman Jesse Hughes appears to be publicly wrestling with the aftermath of last year's horrific Paris terrorist attack, in which gunmen killed 89 people at an EODM show at the Bataclan. Not long ago, Hughes suggested that French gun control...
Tegan And Sara have announced that their eighth album, called Love You To Death, will be out on 6/3. It's the follow-up to 2013's Heartthrob, and they finished it this past winter. No word as to what it will sound like -- presumably pretty different considering the jump they made to stadium-ready synth-pop with their last one, but time will tell! The album artwork will be revealed tomorrow (3/11),...
A few weeks back, Strokes frontman Julian Casablancas contributed a cover of the Velvet Underground's "Run Run Run" to HBO's Vinyl, and this week he's back with another fresh VU cover. This one is of "White Light/White Heat" from their 1968 album of the same name, and it's specifically based on the version of the track that appears on Lou Reed's live album Rock 'n' Roll Animal. Listen below.
It's been about four years since Bat For Lashes offered her last full-length, The Haunted Man, but she dropped the single "I Do" a few weeks ago, and the interwebs went abuzz as the single's artwork featured a save-the-date card with 7/1 on it. Today, Natasha Khan is back with another single, "In God's House," and our hopes for a Bat For Lashes summer wedding-themed album came true! The new album will...
"All About That Bass" had one-hit wonder written all over it. The sound, concept, and visual aesthetic were all gimmicky as hell, and even though they were effective gimmicks, they didn't seem like the mark of an artist who was built to last. When the track was becoming an endlessly dominant #1 hit, I praised its smart construction, but I also wondered whether Trainor had anything to offer besides...
On the opening track of the Range’s new album, Potential, project mastermind James Hinton samples the voice of YouTube rapper SdotStar (current view count: 1,450): “Right now, I don’t have a backup plan for if I don’t make it… But even if… I’ll just decide to move on… to something bigger and better…” He clips…
The recirculated air of the Riverside Church’s main chapel seems to grow more stale by the minute. Sunlight shines polychrome through stained glass windows. The pews that seat 2100 people, sky-high columns and arches, and gold-embellished pulpit and stage are magnificent — but void of the energy normally emitted by the worship and song of…
Last week we collectively beheld Under The Canopy, a deadpan Sun Kil Moon parody EP stunning in accuracy and hilarious in execution. The man behind that EP is Morgan Enos, who also writes and records his own music in a pair of projects called Other Houses and Hollow Sunshine. Enos saw our post on Under…
Matthew Healy answers the phone in a daze. “I get in to New York tomorrow. I’m in the UK at the moment. I just flew in from Singapore yesterday.” In the week leading up to their Saturday Night Live debut, the 1975’s shameless, ambitious, endlessly polarizing frontman has been all over the world. …
Scott Hutchison has errands to run. Cigarettes, coffee, snacks — you know, all the essentials for a day in the studio. We walk down the street, toward a gas station, feeling as if we’re in suburbia as a man mows his lawn, a shattered river of grass clippings running across the sidewalk. This is Ditmas…
To call John Cale “prolific” is an inexcusable understatement; the multi-instrumentalist and producer is responsible for some of the most formative music in rock’s history. Born in Wales, Cale attended London’s Goldsmith’s University (which has graduated Damien Hirst, James Blake, and Lucien Freud since Cale’s time there) where he studied viola before moving to the…
Lots of people live through hard times, but few get as many good songs out of it as Margo Price. She has survived her share of trials and tragedies, but the Nashville up-and-comer understands that the best country music transforms such tribulation into triumph. On her solo debut, Midwest Farmer’s Daughter, out in March, she…
For those of us who came of age in the early ’90s, Tortoise — Chicago’s iconic post-rock granddaddies — were a kind of gateway drug for what could be ostensibly deemed “experimental” music. The band’s landmark 1996 release, Millions Now Living Will Never Die, provided, for me at least, essential first contact with what was…
Bob Mould has noticed the changes. Right there across this street in Williamsburg, that’s where he used to park his Dodge Omni, the one that got its windows broken three times in a much different time, a much different place. Half this building didn’t even exist back then. They just built a few more floors…
During the early 1990s Matthew Sweet released three albums that, in retrospect, form a loose trilogy of guitar-driven, big-hearted, coming-of-age power pop. It began with his 1991 breakthrough Girlfriend, whose exacting songcraft, punchy hooks, and references to Winona Ryder and Tuesday Weld (via that glorious cover) conjure the romantic wistfulness that defines adolescence. It’s an…
This was a good year to be a Titus Andronicus fan. Their new album, The Most Lamentable Tragedy, wound up being something of a masterpiece: an epic listening experience that has weird detours and excessive flourishes that somehow cohere into the overall mood of the album, achieving frontman Patrick Stickles’ goal of creating a massive…
Last year, I spoke with Wayne Coyne and asked him to review 2014 — basically, to give us his opinions on a few of the year’s big music stories. Though the Flaming Lips are a band who always seem to be around, who are never too far from the headlines, who you can often see…
When Justin Bieber released his almost-number-one single “Sorry” back in October, I wrote an impassioned screed on the song and Bieber’s Redemption-era sound. “Sorry” was announced as a Skrillex x Blood co-production, to which a lot of people responded: “Who?” Though Michael Tucker has worked on some of the biggest pop records of the past…
After Reykjavik’s Iceland Airwaves last year, I left Iceland with the music of one homegrown artist echoing through my head. The song was “Circus Life,” the band was Fufanu — a group that I’d wound up seeing almost by accident, in one of those rare but welcome happenstance festival experiences where you watch a band…
Cross Record specialize in creeping rock songs that blow in and out like storms, as if Sharon Van Etten and Swans started a post-rock band. Lead singer and songwriter Emily Cross haunts each track with understated whispers that blend personal trauma and epiphany with high-concept musings and Eastern philosophy, soaring into unhinged howls or delicate…
I. EAUX CLAIRES
In what seems like a quiet hour, loose activity fills the lives of the National’s five members. It’s that period of time before the band takes the stage; last-minute decisions and logistics are being hammered out, but it’s also kind of boring and filled with a lot of pacing around…
When Benjamin Curtis died, it seemed like the end of School Of Seven Bells. What began in 2007 as a trio composed of Curtis and twin sisters Alejandra and Claudia Deheza had become a duo of Curtis and Alejandra Deheza by 2012’s Ghostory. In 2014, Alejandra Deheza was the sole member of the band. Curtis…
Son Volt’s 1995 debut, Trace, is an album full of highways and backroads, maps and legends. Sturdily constructed from scraps of rusted country and strange, white-line-feverish imagery, these songs conjure long nights behind the wheel, your only company whichever radio station happens to come through clearly. “Switching it over to AM, searching for a truer…
When I spoke to Julien Baker over the phone, she was on her lunch break. Baker, a Junior at Middle Tennessee State University, works in the A/V department on campus, pulling cable in the rafters during school events “like an audio Tarzan,” she explains. I’ll admit to being initially taken aback by how unreservedly bubbly…
At the heart of every Modern Baseball song lies a question. Not always a literal one — though, more often than not, they have those, too — but the inquisitive nature is built-in to the band’s songwriting style. It feels like there’s a hesitant pause at the end of every sentence and note, like they’re…
Given the nature of her work — the intricate arrangements; the complicated, often byzantine lyrics; the harp; that extraordinarily wild voice — it’s not surprising that Joanna Newsom has managed to engender such a devoted fan base. She is the very definition of a “singular” artist — someone whose work is totally unmistakable as belonging…
Florist’s music centers on moments of specific intimacy. “Hold me when I’m starting to cry,” Emily Sprague sings on “Holdly,” the title track off the band’s new EP. This lyric translates a universal desire into something precise and personal, a real feeling delivered with commanding impact even through hushed vocals. Unadorned, riveting lyrics like these…
I shouldn’t have taken Pure Bathing Culture bowling. Still, that’s what we’re doing. We meet at Brooklyn’s the Gutter, a bowling alley devoid of the nightclub-like luxury offered by most of New York City’s such halls. The duo, composed of Daniel Hindman and Sarah Versprille, are already waiting when I arrive — but there’s a…
Given that the wave of ’90s nostalgia seems to be cresting right about now, it’s only fitting that one of that decade’s most successful and culturally ubiquitous records — Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill — is now getting the proper reissue treatment. Released in 1995, when Alanis was still an unknown here in the States,…
This past Saturday, one of the overwhelming bright spots on the Life Is Beautiful lineup was Duran Duran. It was the promise of seeing an iconic synth-pop group, and it was the promise of a Saturday night spent in Vegas hearing still-indelible classics like “The Reflex” and “Rio” and “Hungry Like The Wolf” live. Upon…
Formed in 2010, Slonk Donkerson is a trio of childhood friends who grew up with each other in Pound Ridge, New York. Though the three official members — Dylan Vandenhoeck (bass/lead vocals), Zack O’Brien (formerly drums, now guitar/backup vocals), and Parker W. Silzer IV (guitar/vocals) — have known each other since they were kids, and…
The Zac Little who answers the door is the same Zac Little from Saintseneca’s band photos — his wiry frame clad in black head-to-toe from boots to vest to collar, his red facial hair gone full Civil War general. Or maybe Civil War-era blacksmith is more appropriate given that when I enter Little’s half-double just…
Tucked away in the corner of a thriving Swedish tech company’s Manhattan office, three Scottish musicians are staring intently at their streaming analytics. The stats are good. “So it can’t all just be our mums listening,” Chvrches lead singer Lauren Mayberry laughs. She’s flanked on the couch by her bandmates Iain Cook and Martin Doherty,…
This month marks the 20th anniversary of Garbage’s self-titled debut, the album responsible for such ’90s megahits as “Only Happy When It Rains” and “Stupid Girl.” It’s an important record for many reasons, not the least of which is that it helped bridge the gap between noisy alternative rock and mainstream pop — incorporating everything…
Next month, California pop-punks FIDLAR will release Too, the follow up to their much-loved self-titled 2013 debut. As evidenced by early singles “40 Oz. On Repeat” and “West Coast” and “Drone,” the new record doesn’t scrimp when it comes to giant hooks or appropriately buzzed-out guitars, but it does add an extra layer to finesse…
