Song of the Day: Clipse, "The Birds Don't Sing"
I was primed to love the new Clipse album Let God Sort Em Out.
Read MoreFiltering by Tag: Song of the Day
Song of the Day: Bruce Springsteen, "Maybe I Don't Know You"
Last week, Bruce Springsteen dropped the long-awaited Tracks II: The Lost Albums, a sorta sequel to the box set Tracks that came out in 1998. While the original Tracks was an odd-and-sods collection culled from a bunch of different corners of the Boss’ recording career, Tracks II is actually seven fully-realized albums that Springsteen wrote, recorded, mixed and mastered and then stuck in a drawer for one reason or another.
Read MoreSong of the Day: HAIM, "All Over Me"
When Haim dropped “The Wire,” the killer single that announced their arrival in the mainstream from their debut full-length Days Are Gone, I assumed they would become the next big thing.
Read MoreSong of the Day: The Beach Boys, "God Only Knows"
Brian Wilson passed away. I like the Beach Boys fine but have never been super invested in them (though I definitely like them more than Noel Gallagher does). But I wholly acknowledge Wilson’s contributions to pop music, and I don’t think his talent or his influence can be overstated. His life seemed tough and sad and strange, but it also seemed like he had access to joy.
My Beach Boys interest is basic as hell, and though I’d like to flex about loving some deep cut from Holland, the fact is my favorite Beach Boys song is “God Only Knows.”
Read MoreSong of the Day: Oasis, "The Girl in the Dirty Shirt"
Oasis are returning for a series of huge concerts this summer. I will not be attending, but I have friends who are hardcore fans who have been able to think of little else since the announcement. There’s been a lot of texting back and forth about the potential set list, largely surrounding the question, “Do they play anything that came out in the current century? Do they even play anything past Be Here Now?”
Read MoreSong of the Day: Solé, "Spell My Name Right"
Sacha Jenkins passed away over the weekend. He was 54 years old.
Read MoreSong of the Day: Madonna, "Beautiful Stranger
Remember when characters from movies would appear in music videos? When was the last time that happened? The past was almost always smellier and worse, but if we’re going to be inundated with retrograde unpleasantless from everywhere at all times, then maybe we can have Scarlett Johansson welcoming Dua Lipa into Jurassic Park.
Read MoreSong of the Day: The Porkers, "Aporkalypso"
Ska music keeps threatening to come back, but though certain elements of the late ‘90s two-tone revival have wormed their way into contemporary music, there will be no reconsidering the relative legacies of Voodoo Glow Skulls or Reel Big Fish.
That’s fine, by the way.
Read MoreSong of the Day: H.I.M., "Right Here In My Arms"
On my very first day as an editorial assistant at Spin, I didn’t do a whole lot of work. Does anybody do much of anything on their first day? You meet some people, you settle into your space, you get a spiel from IT about your computer, and otherwise you’re just setting up your e-mail signature and waiting for people to ask you to do stuff (which they don’t feel comfortable doing yet because they have known you for all of 22 minutes).
Read MoreSong of the Day: Scott Weiland, "Barbarella"
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 MoreSong of the Day: Jarvis Cocker, "Don't Let Him Waste Your Time"
Pulp 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 MoreSong of the Day: Suede, "Animal Nitrate"
Despite my longtime devotion to ‘90s Britpop, I was late to Suede.
Read MoreSong of the Day: They Might Be Giants, "Till My Head Falls Off"
I 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 MoreSong of the Day: Age of Apocalypse, "Mortal Coil"
Even 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 MoreSong of the Day: Lucy Dacus, "Ankles"
Lucy Dacus is in a weird position at the moment.
Read MoreSong of the Day: Playboi Carti, "Pop Out"
I 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 MoreSong of the Day: The 1975, "If You're Too Shy (Let Me Know)"
Chuck 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 MoreSong of the Day: Anxious, "Counting Sheep"
Keeping 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 MoreSong of the Day: Silkk the Shocker, "It Takes More"
Back when I was an aspiring music theater performer, I took voice lessons once a week at the University of Hartford's Hartt School of Music. I started before I had a driver's license, but once I got access to a car that weekly trip became one the perpetual highlights of my week. I liked voice lessons enough, though the real thrill for me was the drive itself. The trip to Hartt was close enough to be convenient but just far enough away to really tuck into an album (generally, it was about a half hour of car time). The route also afforded me a handful of fast food outlets where I could treat myself, strange enough traffic patterns that would allow me plausible deniability should I disappear for longer than usual, and one glorious record store.
I'm pretty sure the shop was an outpost of a local chain called Record Express (there was another one within walking distance of my summer job at a bank in downtown Hartford), though it's possible it was just a Musicland or a Sam Goody. Either way, it was a very fine compact disc emporium with an exceptionally large retail footprint tucked between a Boston Market and a liquor store. I spent an insane amount of time and money in that place, and thinking back I'm amazed at its selection. That was the store where I found a lot of indie rock releases and a handful of new albums by forgotten bands (I distinctly remember the thrill of finding Crash Test Dummies' 1999 magnum opus Give Yourself a Hand, which I could not find anywhere else because nobody cared about Crash Test Dummies), but they also stocked a ton of hip-hop, and that is the place where I got a lot of my rap music education. A lot of the new rap was sold at a deeper discount than anything else, so I felt free to take flyers on a handful of big-selling but radio-unfriendly MCs.
In 1999, that meant brushing up against Master P's No Limit roster, and on the ride home from a voice lesson one night I traded a couple of bucks in my wallet for a copy of Silkk the Shocker's chart-topping album Made Man. Silkk had what I assume was an accidentally inventive flow, full of staccato hiccups and illogical shifts in speed and cadence. But he was a commercial force because he was Master P-adjacent (in fact, Silkk is P's younger brother), and Made Man debuted at the top of the Billboard 200 despite not having a big crossover single to break it in. I thought about 75 percent of Made Man was junk, though I did start to develop an appreciation for the minimalist bombast No Limit's Beats by the Pound production crew, and "It Takes More" is a great example of that: gangster movie strings, Miami bass thump, rickety snares, and a paranoid piano loop. It's a spartan masterpiece that I found unrefined in '99 but now wish was still the in sound of the moment.
Song of the Day: That Dog, "Long Island"
That Dog's Retreat From the Sun turned 20 years old on Saturday, and they celebrated with a front-to-back performance of the album with a concert at the El Rey. It was awesome, full of aging hipsters like myself who made special plans to go out and shout along like they used to.
On the surface, That Dog sound like a relatively typical post-grunge alt-rock outfit, and their biggest hit "Never Say Never" is one of their least evolved—it's sonically fierce but reliant mostly on a big honking riff in the chorus. (Tellingly, the band sort of breezed over it during the set, partially because it comes pretty early in the tracklisting but also because it doesn't seem that interesting to play.) But they actually deploy quite a few bits of sonic weaponry, including a knack for off-kilter harmonizing and a willingness to flesh out their guitar/bass/drum arrangements with various strings (band co-founder Petra Haden, who is no longer a member of the group, is a classically-trained violinist). "Long Island" has a big hook in the chorus but also features a handful of harmonic dips and structural dives that would have confused modern rock radio programmers in 1997. But it's a smash from a parallel universe, particularly with lines like, "By definition a crush must hurt, and they do/ Just like the one I have on you." Sleater-Kinney's Dig Me Out also turned 20 on Saturday, and while it remains a more definitive historical hitching post in female-fronted rock, Retreat From the Sun shouts, frets, and shakes it off with just as much aplomb.