That was a close one. For a second, I thought we might have lost The Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle to the world of literary fiction with last year’s Wolf in White Van. It’s a damn fine book, but I needn’t have worried. The Mountain Goats never leave us for long. Darnielle and company will be […]
I struggled with how to write about Anthony Naples’ “Abrazo,” the newest release from the NYC dance producer’s upcoming Body Pill LP. I mean, I like it, for reasons I’ll get to, but writing about music can be a drag. There are far more interesting thinkers on the subject, but you don’t have to spend […]
Commune with your spiritual forebears often? Nah, me neither, but the ladies—and by “ladies,” I mean “QUEENS”—of THEESatisfaction have used their latest video “Recognition” to pay homage to the sacred sites of African-American artistry, making stops at the Schomburg Center in Harlem, where a portion of Langston Hughes ashes are interred, along with the Philadelphia […]
Out of respect for all the hard-working artists in our lives, we don’t write about shitty songs at Sound It Out. Accentuate the positive, as Bing used to say. It’s an ethos I can get behind, but you know what? I’m not so worried about Sir Paul. No matter how much snark I might lob […]
It’s Julia Ward’s best of 2014 list! Check out all of our 2014 year-end lists here. Todd Terje – It’s Album Time I love Todd Terje because Todd Terje is goofy. Terje is in firm command of his craft, along with the past half-century of electronic music, but good lord, this man has never let a […]
Ever since Amy invited me to contribute to Sound It Out, I have wanted to write about the upcoming reissue of Songs: Ohia’s Didn’t It Rain. I have avoided doing so until now because I don’t know how to write about grief. I cannot properly narrate my own or anyone’s else despair, but Jason Molina could. […]
Go-Go in DC, ghost riding in Oakland, and La Sape in the Congo—it feels like a minor miracle that any regional subcultures still exist. Excuse the Thomas Frank digression, but corporate culture has been gobbling up “cool” for so long that it is amazing that not everything can be homogenized and packaged for mass consumption. […]
Will Giraffage‘s track “Chocolate,” to quote Tom Waits, “change your shorts, change your life, change your life, change into a nine-year-old Hindu boy, get rid of your wife?” Nope, it sure won’t, but is it adorable? Yes. It is adorable. Is it even more adorable knowing that it was written from the perspective of Giraffage’s […]
Staten Island’s reigning urban griot is back—this time in the form of a “vigilante inspired by a quest for personal retribution and bent on saving his community from the grips of crooked authority and urban decay.” At least, that’s what the press release says about Ghostface Killah’s upcoming album 36 Seasons, featuring AZ, Kool G […]
Scratch an Intro to Anthropology class, and you’ll get a theory about twins. We human-types, with our varying degrees of scientific knowledge, have long labored to make heads or tails of this dualistic biological phenomenon. If you left it up to pop culture and creepalicious directors like David Cronenberg, you’d be convinced that twins were […]