Credit: The Ezra Collective (photo courtesy of the band)
The year was 2009; the song was "1901." Even more so than "My Girls," "Two Weeks," and "Stillness Is The Move" -- and arguably only eclipsed by the long-tail dominance of Oracular Spectacular's troika of hits -- the lead single from Phoenix's cheekily titled Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix became the ambient hum of the year's indie crossover boom. The album turns 10 years old this Saturday, and in keeping...
"What you have now is something like Limp Bizkit on one side of the cliff and a lot of pop stuff on the other side," said Travis frontman Fran Healy to music critic Robert Hilburn in the summer of 2000 on the eve of their biggest headlining show in America at that point, at the Wiltern Theatre in Los Angeles. "We're down in the valley and we're trying to say, 'Come on down and check us out.'" Healy...
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 a dry escape from the rain. Getting into the museum is a little stressful; security guards...
Once considered breaking news, album leaks have become largely an innocuous nonentity. Nowadays it’s not only expected but sometimes even encouraged that your fans will have heard your new music long before they can actually purchase it (assuming you’re one of those artists whose fans still buy albums). As such, the frenzy that once accompanied pirating unreleased music has become an artifact of...
Last night, the Toronto Raptors beat the Milwaukee Bucks in gave five of the Eastern Conference Finals. The Raptors now lead the series 3-2, and they've won three games in a row. The next game is Saturday night in Toronto, and if the Raptors win it, then they advance to the NBA Finals. But at least the Bucks won some kind of moral victory last night. Mallory Edens, daughter of Bucks owner Dan Edens,...
At the top of this year we learned the very exciting news that Sleater-Kinney would soon be returning with their first album since 2015 comeback No Cities To Love and that it would be produced by none other than St. Vincent. Earlier this week the band announced their first live show in two years, a headlining slot at North Carolina's Hopscotch Music Festival this September. And now it looks like new...
The Rolling Stones have returned the songwriting credit for the Verve's "Bitter Sweet Symphony" back to Richard Ashcroft. The song, the first single from the band's 1997 album Urban Hymns, is at the the center of an infamous dispute over its credits. The track samples an orchestral arrangement of the Stones' 1965 song "The Last Time" that was performed by the Andrew Oldham Orchestra. The looping sample...
In 2012, Steven Ellison, bka Flying Lotus, properly introduced his rapping alter ego Captain Murphy on a mixtape called Duality. If he were to continue that theme and reintroduce himself as the many-headed beast he's become on Flamagra, then a more fitting title for the album would be Multiplicity. It's been five years since FlyLo released his Grammy-nominated opus You're Dead! and to say the producer/rapper/director/composer/label...
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…
If you were a rock photographer in the mid-’60s, being invited to photograph Bob Dylan was perhaps the best thing that could happen to you. You’d get a front-row view to the then-burgeoning countercultural revolution. You’d get to trade wisdom with the tousle-haired genius who wrote “Visions of Johanna.” And, if all went well, you’d…
La Dispute were in a rut. After playing together (give or take a few members) for close to 15 years, the post-hardcore experimentalists were too stuck in routine and familiarity with each other to come up with ideas for their upcoming album. In search of something — anything — to jump-start their songwriting process, bass…
Admittedly, the name Intellexual is a bit of a forehead-slapper, but hear me out here: The record is good. Like, really good. You’d expect as much from Nico Segal and Nate Fox, guys who played a key role in crafting Chance The Rapper’s euphoric sound and who count Frank Ocean (“U-N-I-T-Y”), Kanye West (“Ultralight Beam”),…
As Weyes Blood, Natalie Mering has spent her career making more than just records: She’s created fully immersive experiences. The singer-songwriter has been self-releasing albums since she was 15, initially using the moniker “Wise Blood” from the Flannery O’Connor novel for her songs. For her self-released debut album The Outside Room, released in 2011, Mering…
In the beginning of 2017, Priests released their debut album Nothing Feels Natural. It was a long-awaited confirmation that this was one of the most exciting young rock bands of our time, and it wound up ranking towards the top of our list of the best albums of that year. Just under two years later,…
