They used to play Björk on The Grind. In the likely event that you don't remember The Grind, it was an MTV dance show, a sort of early-'90s variant on American Bandstand or Soul Train, where attractive young people would spend a half-hour semi-listlessly bouncing around to whatever club tracks were hot at the moment. If I'm remembering right, it was usually stuff from the C+C Music Factory/Marky Mark...
Steely Dan are definitely their own monumental idiosyncratic impossible-to-duplicate entity, but they've also felt important as part of a collective continuum -- a '70s band that reached out to a '50s past and rippled through pop music well past the '90s into now. Subsequently, Aja isn't just their most well-known and best-selling album, it's also one of their most influential, marked by how much of...
Certain rock songs develop their classic status in part because they are built upon riffs so genius in their dumbfounding simplicity that every teenage guitarist in America is inspired to hack away at them. Nirvana's "Come As You Are" is the gold standard in this category, or at least it was in the '90s when I was encountering pubescent guitar-slingers on the reg (and was living that life myself)....
I don't really listen to podcasts. I've never been converted to the format for several reasons. The first of those is that I don't have time to listen to anything for an hour or an hour and a half -- if you've got a long commute in the morning and evening, they could be great, I suppose, but I work from my couch, so my listening time is given over to music. Secondly, most of the podcast hosts I've...
If the first word Dots And Loops calls to mind is "plasticine," the second is "yielding." That these two concepts somehow fail to contradict one another is among the continuing mysteries about Stereolab's fifth LP, which turns 20 today. There had always been a magisterial pomp and fanciful, irradiated sweep to the London-based group, a kitschy, Marxist pep in its genre shuffling step. Rock 'n roll...
The year was 2011. Winter was on the verge of melting away, but the sounds emanating from the north were still plenty frigid. From out of the newly ascendant Toronto scene that gave us Drake came a dark and mysterious figure calling himself the Weeknd. We'd later learn this person was Abel Tesfaye, a child of Ethiopian immigrants whose teenage years were marked by hard drugs and petty crime, and become...
Marilyn Manson still has a career. His new album Heaven Upside Down is out next month, and we've posted his songs "WE KNOW WHERE YOU FUCKING LIVE" and "KILL4ME." Lil Uzi Vert is a fan, and Manson has plans to work with the newly-minted rap star. Justin Bieber is bootlegging his merch. But it can't be denied that the 1999 Columbine massacre, and the widespread-but-erroneous word that the two killers...
Vampire Weekend released their instant-classic third LP Modern Vampires Of The City on May 14, 2013. It was a different world back then: We were all still wondering what Yeezus would sound like, Arcade Fire hadn't even announced Reflektor yet, and Miley Cyrus was still a few weeks away from releasing "We Can't Stop." A more innocent time, to be sure. More than 52 months have passed since then with...
Nothing about Moses Sumney is ordinary. When you set out to solve for x in the equation of two strict Ghanaian parents who also happen to both be pastors, the solution is usually not one acclaimed singer-songwriter operating at an intersection of genres. Especially one that has a B.A. in Creative Writing, a circle of…
There may be better places to see Zola Jesus than a desiccated upstate New York factory full of intense-looking art-goths, but there probably are not many. The bottom of the Mariana Trench, maybe? A deep-space probe? Adrift on an ice floe through inky-black nighttime water while the Northern Lights dance above you? Point is: There…
Ask almost any musician and you’ll get the same answer: Making albums is hard work. From the creative side, wrangling the abstract forms and ideas of music into a tangible presence, to all the technical aftermath, like the long list of minute tweaks that make a record sound good and correct, a lot of exertion…
Chris Hillman bought his first smartphone just a few months ago. “I didn’t want one,” he admits. “I had a flip-top phone and that was fine. But there’s a new baby in the house. My daughter had a girl, so I got the smartphone for the camera.” Soon his trepidation turned to astonishment at the…
Emily Haines has been releasing music for 21 years, stretching her ineffably gorgeous songwriting across a variety of genres from synth-pop to raw acoustic instrumentation. Under the name Emily Haines & The Soft Skeleton — a fitting moniker that evokes mortality as well as comfort — she continues her talent for soundtracking intimate emotional burdens…
Twenty years ago this month, in September of 1997, Capitol Records became the first major label to sell and digitally distribute a single from a well-known artist on the internet, arguably one of the most significant milestones in the history of the music industry. Duran Duran’s “Electric Barbarella,” the second single from the band’s Medazzaland…
Next Monday, a unique double-header is coming to LA’s Hollywood Bowl: New Order and Goldfrapp. The pairing is an interesting one, New Order being legends and progenitors in the field of synth-pop and the shape-shifting Goldfrapp (mostly) being a like-minded descendent from two decades later. Having just released a new album, Silver Eye, back in…
Welcome to the third installment of “Tracking Down,” a new Stereogum franchise in which we talk to artists who have been out of the spotlight for a minute.…
There are streets like this all over America. Broad boulevards lined with roadside diners, fast-food outposts that haven’t been updated since the ‘80s, small stores with signs from the decade before, auto-parts shops, blocks where everyone knows everyone else who lives there. In pop culture, it often gets figured as “nowhere,” but it’s more accurate…
With three rapid-fire albums in just 14 months throughout 2014 and 2015, high-octane garage-psych combo Wand established themselves as one of the most prolific bands in America. Plum, the Los Angeles band’s fourth LP, is the sound of Wand slowing down and broadening their palette.
A silver van with California plates has just pulled up outside Brooklyn’s Murmrr Theatre, off Prospect Park’s Grand Army Plaza, and behind the wheel is a familiar face. And yet, different.
It’s not just that DIIV’s Zachary Cole Smith now sports two-tone locks, his familiar bleached blond hair newly offset by long dark roots.
Pig-headed masculinity run amok? America in spiritual crisis? A dying Earth? This sounds like a job for Tori Amos!
Molly Rankin and Alec O’Hanley — the songwriting duo at the core of Toronto-based indie-pop band Alvvays — look a bit drained as they both lean on the edge of a picnic table in Chicago’s Grant Park. It’s hard to blame them, given that it’s the final day of a sprawling four-day Lollapalooza. I’m drained…
The Cool Kids are a decade deep in the game but they feel like rookies again. To compare them to the new wave of rookies in the NBA, they would be most like Ben Simmons. The 6’10” 21-year-old is officially listed as a forward but he can truly play every position on the floor. The…
The US record industry was doing numbers in the late 1990s that seem incomprehensible now. The year 2000 was the all-time peak, with 785 million total album sales according to Soundscan. In 2001, that number would drop to 763 million, and 681 million the year after that, and it’s been downhill ever since. But in…
