Forty years ago this weekend, Chic released one of music's great historical delineation points (and a mother of a dancefloor-filler). "Good Times" is more than just a song, even though it'd be immortal if a song was all it was: widely considered the last #1 of the disco era before the industry backlash/burnout on the genre cut Chic's career off at the knees, it's also the stealth torch-passing of dance...
Recently, Morrissey has been splitting his fanbase by making difficult-to-defend statements. He has, for example, doubled and tripled down on his support of For Britain, a far-right and virulently anti-immigration UK political party. Morrissey's future tourmates Interpol have declined to comment on the man's statements, but his peer Billy Bragg has said a few things: "I have no sympathy for [Morrissey],...
All right, nerds. Jenovavirus. Demo #1. Check this out: Doug hipped me to this Japanese three-piece earlier this month, knowing its outré take on slamming brutal death metal would blow my brain to bits. Indeed, it done blowns it. The Wormed-y cybernetic wooshes? The overflowing Noah's Ark of atypical vocal tics? The beastly slams that are a siren's call to all degenerates? I'm hooked. Obsessed. Where...
The phrase “I was born in the wrong generation” has become something of a meme, uttered in earnest by millennials wearing $60 distressed Rolling Stones T-shirts. It’s the kind of lifestyle slogan you might find under a sepia-toned Instagram picture, perhaps alongside “#festivalvibes.” I have never felt this way. I think my neuroses are actually quite well-suited for our modern age. I am not...
Tonight, we hear Whitney Houston's first posthumous song, a 1991 cover of Steve Winwood’s 1986 song “Higher Love” produced by Norwegian DJ Kygo. The song was first performed live by Houston at a Tokyo concert in 1990, then recorded in the studio the next year. It was intended for her third album, I’m Your Baby Tonight. Clive Davis, the former Arista Records boss who discovered and worked with...
The rush that comes with a perfect pop song is elusive but unmistakable. "Pop music" can mean many things, but there's a certain kind of monster jam that scans as POP MUSIC in neon lights, the kind that sends euphoria coursing through your nervous system and launches your body onto the dance floor. Big, bright hooks beam out over massive synthetic beats. The textures, the dynamics, and the composition...
Do you have trouble remembering your dreams? Thom Yorke does. In footage from 1994 that resurfaced this week on Reddit, an interviewer asks Yorke if he has strange dreams. The Radiohead frontman's reply: I never remember my dreams, actually. Hardly ever at all, unfortunately... I think probably if I was that in tune with my dreams that I wouldn't write the way I write. I mean I kind of tend to use...
(Warning: Minor spoilers ahead.) There have been more than a few movies inspired by the Beatles. The most recent major release was Across The Universe (2007), a musical drama that chronicles the lives of three young adults enduring the tumult of the 1960s. Yesterday, written by Richard Curtis (Love Actually, Notting Hill) and directed by Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire, Trainspotting) isn’t a musical,...
The first time I saw Anthony Naples, he was shrouded in fog. He was DJing his residency at the Ridgewood, NY club Nowadays, lighting the misty dancefloor up with thorny techno and scrappy house. I saw an artist in full control of his craft as a DJ, unconcerned with appearances as a “performer.” Now, Naples…
It might be hard to believe, but Spoon have now been releasing music for close to 25 years. Initially, the recent announcement of a greatest hits compilation might’ve seemed a little odd. These guys still feel in the midst of a lengthier-than-usual prime, their oft-mentioned and absurd level of consistency ensuring they have staved off…
“Where do you go when you just wanna go? Where do you go when you let it all go?” Emily Sprague asks on a song from Florist’s third album, which was written as an escape — from life’s external pressures, from the constant buzzing inside your own mind. It’s an album that’s constantly looking for…
“Method Man,” the lead single of Detroit-based rock musician Stef Chura’s new album, Midnight, paints a picture of a dude whose condescension is dreadfully magnetic. Driven by an fervor and fixation similar to that that fuels the type of relationship it describes, Chura’s vocals and the accompanying instrumentals speed up and intensify as the song…
Carlos Santana has a lot to celebrate in 2019. It’s the 50th anniversary of his band’s self-titled debut album, which was released on August 30, 1969. Two weeks before that, the band gave a legendary performance at the Woodstock festival in upstate New York. They’d been a popular live act in San Francisco, but their…
The rain can force us into unexpected places. Sometimes, it’s for the better. Such is the case when I meet Welsh musician and novice furniture maker Cate Le Bon in New York City during a torrential downpour. We take refuge in the Guggenheim, as our expected coffee shop has been overtaken by others also finding…
Trevor Shelley de Brauw is a pretty busy guy. In addition to being the guitarist in Pelican and RLYR — and releasing an excellent solo album, Uptown, in 2017 — he’s also a father and works full-time as a music publicist. (Full disclosure: de Brauw did press for my band United Nations’ last full-length in…
Do you remember being small in a big confusing world? Do you remember feeling excitement for the first time or being cognizant of how clothes fell on your body for the first time? Not many people do, or most of us don’t dare to think back on it. For shoegazey Madison rockers Slow Pulp, this…
(Trigger warning: this article contains discussion of sexual assault.)
In 2015, Charly Bliss had self-released a three-song EP called Soft Serve and were more than content to play tiny Brooklyn venues whenever the opportunity arose. “We were crushing it,” says drummer Sam Hendricks. “Spike Hill on a Tuesday.”
You can call Holly Herndon a doctor now. When I meet the experimental composer in lower Manhattan in April, she’s just arrived from the Bay Area, where she successfully defended her dissertation at Stanford’s Center For Computer Research In Music And Acoustics. Now that her PhD program is behind her, Herndon has moved from California…
Part of Sass’ origin took place at a party in a Minneapolis apartment complex turned personal palace that has 35 rooms and seven bathrooms, all lavishly dedicated to the 1960s. (Really, it’s quite something.) It was in one of those rooms that Stephanie Murck met Willem Vander Ark. Murck had been involved with some other…
“Let’s do the whale.”
It’s impossible to step into the American Museum Of Natural History and not feel a sense of childhood wonder. For anyone who grew up in New York City or the surrounding area, it was the site of class field trips and sugar-rushed weekends where it seemed like the entire…
Not many people would cackle as their house goes up in flames, but that image perfectly illustrates the kind of person and artist Yola is. Named for that tragic experience, her debut album Walk Through Fire came out in February. Its seamless blend of triple fiddles, steel, and shimmering tremolo guitars feels superbly refined, making…
The Get Up Kids were looking for a job and then they found some jobs. After the beloved Kansas punk band went on hiatus in 2011, main songwriter Matt Pryor became a farmhand — “I picked radishes and tomatoes and shit and it was awesome.” Guitarist/vocalist Jim Suptic went back to school and landed with…
In the first half of the decade, the Portland duo Pure Bathing Culture made their name with a mixture of dream-pop, soft rock, and folk leanings — and became a Stereogum Band To Watch in the process. Across their first two albums, 2013’s Moon Tides and 2015’s Pray For Rain, the couple of Daniel Hindman…
