When he was still alive, Leonard Cohen's music carried the sort of somber gravity that we usually only attach to musicians once they've died. Death was always one of Cohen's great subjects; sex and deception and the acceptance and understanding melancholy were others. The news of his death hit me like a sledgehammer last night, but it really shouldn't. In both his life and his work, Cohen had long...
A Tribe Called Quest have dropped We Got It From Here...Thank You 4 Your Service, their sixth studio album and first in 18 years. This right here is how a legacy act should update. There are plenty of nods to the Tribe of old: Phife Dawg (R.I.P.) sounding great employing different flows and his classic Caribbean-tinged Queens accent, Busta Rhymes with some vintage rambunctiousness and his own tropical...
There was a moment last December when a lightbulb went off in my head, though it glowed more like a string of Christmas lights. My wife, daughter, and I were driving home from a family gathering, listening to one of those radio stations that switches to exclusively holiday music after Thanksgiving. It was probably the contemporary Christian station because the song that emerged from our speakers had...
The world changed Tuesday, and yet it carries on. Most of us still have the same responsibilities we did at the beginning of the week, before Donald Trump's "extraordinary" campaign made him the most unusual president-elect in American history, and we had to fulfill them Wednesday regardless of what sort of reaction his election elicited in us. Jobs, classes, families: Life kept happening, and we had...
It's true! The xx do have a new album called I See You coming soon -- this January, to be specific. They officially announced it this morning and shared lead single "On Hold," an understated yet soaring disco ballad in the classic xx vein that spotlights all three members (and could almost pass for a three-way vocal collaboration if you count Jamie xx's production samples as his voice). It's just about...
RTJ3 might not be here yet, but Run The Jewels still are. Killer Mike and El-P have just shared "2100," a new RTJ song featuring frequent collaborator Boots, as a response to Trump's election. "for everyone who is hurting or scared right now. here is a song we wrote months ago. we weren't planning on releasing it yet but… well it feels right, now," they write in a note that accompanies the track....
Dance music stalwart Moby was a staunch Hillary Clinton supporter early on, and he continued his support for the Democratic presidential nominee right up to the election yesterday. He released two songs as part of the 30 Days, 30 Songs campaign, and just last week appeared in actor Rachel Bloom's "We Are The World" parody "Holy Shit (You've Got To Vote)." Today, deflated and frustrated by Clinton's...
Donald Trump used to feel OK about rap music -- or, at the very least, he used to present himself as someone who felt OK about rap music. He sort of had to. Trump was a participant in the New York new-money celebrity-glamor economy, which meant he moved in the same circles as plenty of people on rap's A-list. When Puff Daddy launched his restaurant, Justin's, in 1997, Trump showed up to the opening....
“In my country, and in a lot of countries, people still go to the well to get their water,” Vagabon’s Laetitia Tamko explains to me as she begins to reveal the metaphorical crux of one of her new songs. Tamko grew up in Cameroon before moving to New York in the early 2000s, and she…
Back in the summer of 2014, Casper Clausen, Rasmus Stolberg, and Mads Brauer of Efterklang, and their touring drummer, Finnish percussionist Tatu Rönkkö, were invited to present a special collaboration at Finland’s Our Festival. The idea was: They spend 10 days in a cottage in the Finnish countryside, writing new music together, and present their…
Margaret Glaspy has had a big year. You could maybe even call it a huge year. The New York-based musician recorded her debut full-length, Emotions And Math, in her bedroom, fully intending to self-release it. Instead, she got picked up by ATO Records, put out the album, and has been touring throughout the US and…
Upstairs At Eric’s is an apartment and photo studio in midtown Manhattan owned by photographer Eric Johnson. It’s not necessarily named for the Yazoo album; Johnson just liked the name. There are platinum album plaques for Lauryn Hill and Maxwell scattered about, industrial lights in the corner and a gray Bengal house cat named Cooley…
Shirley Collins is living history. The 81-year-old artist is best known as one of England’s premier folk singers of the ’60s revival, but her contributions extend far beyond that. Collins is a writer, lecturer, oral historian, and perhaps most importantly: a song collector. …
Every now and then, you look at a lineup for Bonnaroo or Panorama or some other mainstream festival, and tucked amidst all the expected indie and pop and rap names is the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. It’s one of the more curious narratives in our little pocket of the music landscape — that this group,…
The year Bonnie Raitt turned 40, she became a pop star. …
Like any flailing twenty-something, Oakland-based Australian Hazel English feels an anxiety-inducing lack of control. The kind you feel when relocating over 12,000 miles across the globe, knowing all but no one in your new home. The “out of control” that exists when building a music career in foreign territory, relying on musicians you meet at…
Appropriately enough, Kero Kero Bonito got their start on the internet. In 2013, school friends Gus Lobban and Jamie Bulled posted an advertisement on an ex-pat message board in hopes of finding a Japanese singer in London who wanted to be in a band. They met their match in Sarah Perry, then a fellow university…
Tove Lo is walking directly into bumper-to-bumper traffic. Terrified, I run to catch up, convinced my interview subject is about to get pancaked by a tractor-trailer. But she’s fine — it turns out that the Swedish pop singer has mastered the art of New York City jaywalking. She seamlessly strides across the jam-packed intersection with…
Following up one of the most acclaimed albums of the decade would be tough for any band. But as in all other matters, Greg Dulli and the Afghan Whigs did it with style. Released in the spring of 1996, the Afghan Whigs’ fifth album, Black Love, is packed with snarling, caustic rock songs (“My Enemy,”
David Crosby is a legend, but you already knew that. Between the Byrds and Crosby, Stills, & Nash (& sometimes Young), he’s been in some of the most foundational classic rock groups out there. These are the kinds of bands where entire genres and sounds owe a debt to the specifics of their work, from…
I have already taken to this website to expound, at great length and indulgence, about my undying love for Tori Amos and her third album, Boys For Pele. So, when Stereogum asked if I wanted to interview Ms. Amos about the upcoming re-release of Pele, I all but screamed: “Stop talking! Yes, let’s do this…
Dan Boeckner has one of those voices. He speaks, and it’s low and worn and gravelly, the sound of someone who’s been around, who has swallowed all the experiences the world tried to give him and has let them etch their marks into his body on the way down. There’s that trope: the eyes of…
The first half of “Denial” — the third single from Mannequin Pussy’s sophomore album, Romantic — is designed to sound like someone having a panic attack. Marisa Dabice is trapped inside her own head, unable to escape a spiraling depressive cycle: “At night sometimes my thoughts collide/ My body shakes/ I feel so separated from…
