In 2010, back when they were still a duo called Reading Rainbow, the Philadelphia band Bleeding Rainbow released Prism Eyes, exactly the sort of very good indie rock album that gets overlooked all…   Read Story »

Toro Y Moi was once associated with the electronic pop subgenre and short cultural moment known as chillwave. There. That's done. As far as I'm concerned -- and I seem to be the only critic who…   Read Story »

Rock critics aren't really expected to be forecasters of popular taste. And thank fuck for that, because I'm goddam terrible at it. The one time I ever wrote anything for Gawker, here's what I told…   Read Story »

St. Patrick's Day 2001, I'm shipping back up to Syracuse, back to school after a spring break spent doing nothing but playing Wrestlemania 2000 on the Nintendo 64 and drinking with my friends in…   Read Story »

If you're willing to publicly admit to enjoying Chief Keef's music, you're going to have to deal with a few uncomfortable realities. For one thing, he certainly presents himself to the world as a…   Read Story »

After Speakerboxxx, after Big Boi Presents Got Purp?, after Sir Lucious Left Foot, it's now possible to say that Big Boi, the solo artist, has his very own aesthetic -- one pretty far removed from…   Read Story »

If you're a regular reader of Album Of The Week, you know this space is traditionally reserved for and occupied by Tom -- every Tuesday, he picks the album and then he writes about it. This week,…   Read Story »

When Jay-Z and Beyoncé showed up at a Grizzly Bear show in Brooklyn three years ago, I was working for Pitchfork and had to write a news story about it, because that's what my life is like. In my…   Read Story »

It's hard to imagine any project of Ian MacKaye's going underrated, but there it is. Growing up as a punk kid in Baltimore, in the D.C. scene's shadow, in the '90s, that guy exerted a crazy amount of…   Read Story »

During the spring of 1993, my family took a vacation, making the 15-hour drive from the Baltimore suburbs to Disney World. During the endless and queasy ride, I sat in the back of my family's Ford…   Read Story »