For reasons beyond my understanding, there are a handful of recent-ish reviews of my deeply out of print book up on Goodreads. They all basically give the proper assessment: it’s not especially good or even coherent, but the enthusiasm is there. There is one sentiment that popped up that I thought deserved further exploration: that I was too mean to Stone Temple Pilots.
Read MoreStreaming music is broadly bad.
Read MorePulp have returned! They’ve actually been back a couple of times since disbanding shortly after the release of their 2001 album We Love Life, but this time they’ve got a new album with a great new single.
I’ll write about it soon, but today I’ve got one of Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker’s solo joints stuck in my head.
Read MoreWhen I first started buying music, it was on cassette tapes.
Read MoreDespite my longtime devotion to ‘90s Britpop, I was late to Suede.
Read MoreI don’t think they were ever my favorite band (none of their albums are in my top 100 list), but there was definitely a period of my life when I was a very intense apologist for They Might Be Giants.
Read MoreEven though the way we find, consume, and think about music has been repeatedly upended, it’s mildly comforting that there are still some constants. Chart breakthroughs are still meaningful. Physical sales still count for something. Little trend pockets can still cross over and influence the mainstream. Lots of stuff about the current music world is a drag, like Kate Nash literally showing her ass so she can pay for a tour. But even I, a deeply depressed cynic, find silver linings on a lot of these clouds.
Read MoreMy relationship to electronic music has always been mercurial. My first real experiences with it likely came during the ‘90s Euro-pop boom on mainstream radio—the big tent voice-based house and techno jams like Real McCoy’s “Another Night,” Corona’s “The Rhythm of the Night” and La Bouche’s “Be My Lover,” alongside the rise of Ace of Base. I didn’t like most of that stuff at the time, though I have a lot of nostalgia wrapped up in some of that stuff (I’ll always ride for Gina G’s “Ooh Aah…Just a Little Bit”)
Read MoreLucy Dacus is in a weird position at the moment.
Read MoreI’m not sure when I heard David Bowie for the first time. I imagine I heard “Space Oddity,” which was one of those songs that was always in the air, floating through radio airspace and embedding itself in the carpet even if you weren’t going out of your way to find it. I also have a clear memory of seeing Tin Machine perform on an old episode of Saturday Night Live hosted by Macaulay Culkin. (Like the rest of the universe, I was unimpressed.) I was aware of Bowie and what a towering figure he was, and I had seen him on screen in Labyrinth and The Last Temptation of Christ, but if I’m being perfectly honest the first time I really engaged with David Bowie was when he was interviewed next to Trent Reznor on MTV.
Read MoreI have a hard time with Playboi Carti. He seems like he’d be a really rough hang, and the predominant narrative about his output in the past 18 months has been how strangely difficult it has been to hear new music by him. But a big part of me admires just how intensely he has managed to stick to his guns and how much he has bent the mainstream to his deeply chaotic approach.
Read MoreChuck Klosterman once half-jokingly wrote about how Radiohead’s Kid A might have predicted 9/11. I don’t think Thom Yorke had any sort of inside info about the comings and goings of international terrorists, but I do acknowledge it’s kind of wild that album feels like what life was in the immediate aftermath of that attack, even though Kid A arrived nearly a full year before the event. Kid A wasn’t a response to 9/11, but it felt like one, and retroactively feels like the soundtrack to life in New York in the aftermath. (The same could also be said of PJ Harvey’s Stories From the City, Stories From The Sea, which also came out in the fall of 2000, is all about urban isolation, and features vocals from Yorke.)
In a similar vein, I sometimes think Matty Healy of the 1975 anticipated the COVID-19 pandemic.
Read MoreI’m always making lists, and last year I put together a compendium of my 100 favorite albums of all time. The only hard and fast criterion followed was that at some point in my life I had to have considered each record on the list to be my absolute favorite at that time. My long list was way longer than 100 but I managed to whittle it down to a representative rundown. It’s a living document (I’ve swapped out a handful of titles since the initial drafting), but the bulk of the entries feel pretty permanent. I didn’t bother to rank them (for sorting purposes, it was easier to leave the list in alphabetical order) so I tossed the whole list into a random generator and will endeavor to break down each individual entry in this space.
Let’s begin with the Ramones, whose first four full-length releases (1976’s Ramones, 1977’s Leave Home and Rocket to Russia and 1978’s Road to Ruin) are all bulletproof compendiums of raw punk energy and deceptively sweet songcraft. So why do I gravitate toward a far more uneven release from the Ramones’ tumultuous 1980s?
Read MoreKeeping your horizons (musical or otherwise) expanded gets harder with age, and I like to think I’m a more open-minded listener than most. But sometimes I find myself circling back to the most comfortable stuff possible, even if it is made by a group of dudes who don’t remember 9/11.
Read MoreEvery Monday, I make myself a playlist of (mostly) new songs. It gets me in the habit of hunting for new music and hopefully gets me embracing fresh trends. This is the Monday Mixtape.
Missy Elliott, “Why I Still Love You”
Caught up in the fervor over the release of Taylor Swift’s Lover was the arrival of Missy Elliott’s new EP Iconology, her first collection of new songs in a decade (she’s put out singles here and there but this is the biggest single batch of Missy songs since The Cookbook came out in 2005). The single “Throw It Back” is a reasonable enough blast of hip-hop beat science, but Missy still has a knack for turning modern R&B on its ear as it bridges the past and the future.
Every Monday, I make myself a playlist of (mostly) new songs. It gets me in the habit of hunting for new music and hopefully gets me embracing fresh trends. This is the Monday Mixtape.
You can now listen to the Monday Mixtape show every Monday on demand on your SiriusXM app!
Sleater-Kinney, “Can I Go On”
When Sleater-Kinney returned from a decade-long hiatus with 2015’s No Cities To Love, it sounded a lot like what the natural evolution of a Sleater-Kinney album would always sound like.
Every Monday, I make myself a playlist of (mostly) new songs. It gets me in the habit of hunting for new music and hopefully gets me embracing fresh trends. This is the Monday Mixtape.
The Regrettes, “More Than a Month”
There’s a trend from the ‘90s that my old buddy Zack used to describe as the “hard jangle,” which describes the sound of a certain type of alternative-adjacent pop band. Though many of these bands had punk roots and shambolic histories, they bent their sound toward cascading melodies and a cleanliness in their guitar sound with just the right amount of crunch. Some of these bands, like Gin Blossoms and Goo Goo Dolls, became huge crossover phenomena. Toad the Wet Sprocket is a definitive hard jangle band. Some moments on Weezer’s self-titled debut are hard jangly. Not all of it was great (the first Maroon 5 album is also very hard jangle), but the best ones among them were female-fronted like Belly and Letters to Cleo.
Every Monday, I make myself a playlist of (mostly) new songs. It gets me in the habit of hunting for new music and hopefully gets me embracing fresh trends. This is the Monday Mixtape.
Mark Ronson feat. King Princess, “Pieces of Us”
Ronson has been promoting his new album Late Night Feelings as a break-up record, and he’s not kidding: None of the throwback froth of his previous effort Uptown Special can be found within, replaced instead by icy beats and nakedly emotional longing. On paper it’s a recipe for disaster, but in execution it is exquisite and bracing. That’s largely thanks to Ronson’s keen ear for collaborators, including a bunch of well-established stars (Miley Cyrus, Camila Cabello, Alicia Keys) and plenty of people nobody has ever heard of (Yebba, Diana Gordon, Ilsey). Somewhere in the middle of those two poles lies King Princess, a gender-fluid bedroom folk-popper who got a bit of attention on alternative radio for her song “1950” and who possesses both an exquisitely broken voice and a knack for making melodies shine. This is not as good as the Ronson/Cyrus joint “Nothing Breaks Like a Heart” (one of the ten best songs of this decade), but this thing still cries while it bangs.
Every Monday, I make myself a playlist of (mostly) new songs. It gets me in the habit of hunting for new music and hopefully gets me embracing fresh trends. This is the Monday Mixtape.
Bruce Springsteen, “Sundown”
The new Bruce album Western Stars is a startlingly majestic album cover in search of some solid tunes, but it’s hard to deny Springsteen’s minimalist ode to the Laurel Canyon sound. I keep waiting for every song to find a second gear, though the only one that really does anything remotely like chugging is “Sundown,” which cashes a lot of checks on a surprisingly light touch on the old-man-at-the-end imagery. Springsteen might be playing himself by releasing a definitive Dad Rock album the weekend of Father’s Day, but maybe he’s just more business savvy than I give him credit for. And he still has a hell of a damn voice.