Adam Schlesinger, the longtime Fountains Of Wayne co-leader who also composed countless ridiculously catchy songs for movies and TV, has died of complications from coronavirus. Variety reports that he passed away Wednesday morning after being hospitalized with COVID-19 and put on a ventilator last week. He was divorced and is survived by two daughters. He was only 52. Born in 1967 in New York City,...
At the end of the week, Stephen Bruner will release his latest album as Thundercat, It Is What It Is. He's once again crafted an LP that, at times, feels like one long continuous piece -- a 43-minute liquefied opus that exists in some unknown territory crossroads between soul, jazz, funk, and electronic. As ever, it's the sound of a hungry, adventurous mind, one with years and years of musical knowledge...
"I been to the point where I felt like I was gonna die, bro," says Scarface. His thundering old-testament voice creaks and catches, a desiccated echo of its usual self. His eyes are watery and bloodshot, and his face is lined. He's got on a baseball cap and no shirt, and his camera is pointed up at his face in just about the least flattering angle imaginable. He looks terrible. Willie D, Scarface's...
Allow me to reintroduce Yves Tumor. Actually, allow "Gospel For A New Century" to do it. The first song on Tumor's new album Heaven To A Tortured Mind is a triumphal entry -- the sound of royalty strutting into town with exultant swagger, flanked by a resplendent posse, with the grandeur of Prince Ali's marching menagerie and the grit of Furiosa barreling down the Fury Road on a War Rig. In sync with...
All Gareth David wanted to do was find a few friends. And if they were into indie rock, so much the better. He had just enrolled at Cardiff University, and he didn't know anyone at all. Fortunately, he had just discovered Myspace right before heading out to university. "[Myspace] had a really amazing ability to search for bands," he remembers. "So just searching for people with Pavement in their profile...
There are only two things I'm capable of writing with any degree of honesty. 1. Hey. It’s, uh, been a month. You’ve no doubt had the same kind of month. The near-universality of the baseline experience allows me to cut to the chase here. We’re all living through COVID-19’s reign in excruciating real time. You know what’s up. And yet, do any us know which way is up now? The past few weeks...
Future Nostalgia was meant for the club. This much is clear. Even before she released lead single "Don't Start Now" last fall, Dua Lipa was talking about taking inspiration from the disco era: "I feel like you could dance through the whole record," she told The Face. The British pop star has been working her way back to Studio 54 ever since her tropical-house jam "New Rules" broke big on both sides...
The buzzy, big-name albums from 2009 were artsy and ambitious. Animal Collective, Dirty Projectors, and Grizzly Bear would dominate year-end lists, but at the same time those albums were blowing up, a strain of music was taking hold that engaged with a completely opposite aesthetic: not giving a shit, or at least pretending not to give a shit. The summer of chillwave, which emphasized low fidelity...
At the end of the week, Stephen Bruner will release his latest album as Thundercat, It Is What It Is. He’s once again crafted an LP that, at times, feels like one long continuous piece — a 43-minute liquefied opus that exists in some unknown territory crossroads between soul, jazz, funk, and electronic. As ever,…
All Gareth David wanted to do was find a few friends. And if they were into indie rock, so much the better. He had just enrolled at Cardiff University, and he didn’t know anyone at all. Fortunately, he had just discovered Myspace right before heading out to university.
Sometimes you need to forget, and sometimes you need to feel. Deeper are all about the latter. The Chicago quartet, currently made up of singer and guitarist Nic Gohl, guitarist Drew McBride, drummer Shiraz Bhatti, and bassist Kevin Fairbairn, are about to release their new album Auto-Pain, and there’s a lot of pathos to be…
Detroit rockers Dogleg have spent the last several months building a considerable amount of buzz around their debut LP, Melee — and its release, which is set for this Friday, was perfectly timed with what would’ve been an all-out performance assault at this year’s SXSW festival in Austin, Texas. “We’d been sitting on the record…
The results of Super Tuesday have not lightened Jami Morgan’s already dim view of American politics. “We were watching it last night and it fucking sucks, dude,” the Code Orange drummer/vocalist/primary mouthpiece grumbles, and like just about every worthwhile artist who’s publicly endorsed a presidential candidate, all five band members — Morgan, guitarist/vocalist Reba Meyers,…
It’s after midnight in the early days of the new millennium and Chris Carrabba is wide the fuck awake. He hasn’t been getting much sleep lately — especially not at nighttime.
Snarls’ music is as much about self-preservation and baring teeth as their name suggests, even though that wasn’t the point. One day someone blurted out “The Snarls” at practice. From there they dropped “the,” and the Ohio-based band had the perfect moniker to contain their roaring emo pop-punk fusion.
If there’s one moment on Caribou’s upcoming album Suddenly that boils down its elastic essence, it’s the transition from verse to chorus on second single “You And I.” Initially, the song floats on pillowy chords, a twinkling lead melody, and a persistent midtempo beat, instantly recalling the spaciest moments on the last Caribou album, 2015’s…
It’s been said before, quite possibly about every album Destroyer’s released in the past 15 years, but the latest, Have We Met, is a very different Destroyer album.
If you live in the British coastal town of Brighton, it’s hard not to feel the ever-present draw of the sea, for better or for worse. For Dana Margolin, the pebbly beach and great watery beyond that signal the end of Brighton’s city center became particularly entangled with her life around the time she was…
No matter how vulnerable or genuine a musician’s work is, when they get up on stage there is always an added performative element. Whether under their own name or an alias, they’re recreating a past state of mind — one that still might be fresh, but is reconstructed nonetheless. Ella O’Connor Williams considered this when…
Every album Daniel Lopatin has made feels like a portal into an alternate universe. His earliest work as Oneohtrix Point Never, made almost solely on his father’s old Roland Juno-60 synthesizer and collected on Rifts, formed a sprawling multi-album narrative about an astronaut dying in space. The crumbling TV commercials of Replica, MIDI church hymnals…
David Bazan is crying while driving. Many scenes in the new documentary Strange Negotiations find the once and future Pedro The Lion frontman alone, steering his sedan down endless highways between emotionally taxing house shows. In this one, he reaches his breaking point, despairing over the loneliness of his chosen path and the conflict between…
Over the course of this decade, Jenny Hval has built up a catalog of boundary-pushing, thought-provoking electronic music that’s rightfully earned her consistent acclaim and fascination. Two months ago, she released her latest collection, The Practice Of Love, the culmination of that decade’s worth of work. The immediate impact on first listen was hearing the…
For the sake of technical accuracy on their Bandcamp tags, Glass Beach identifies as a Los Angeles “post-emo” group. But ask the infectiously gleeful quartet where they live spiritually, sonically, and socially, it’s all the same answer: “online.” “Us, and people who are online as us, get information about the outside world from our Twitter…
