I’m falling deeper and deeper into this enchanting puzzle of an album by J Fernandez. Like an M.C. Escher painting for the ears, Many Levels of Laughter invites repeated listens that reveal different facets of sound and structure each time. After a good week of digging into it, I feel less and less certain I […]
For this review of the 10th-anniversary deluxe reissue of Black Mountain‘s self-titled debut, I’m joined by my erstwhile travel companion Funky Donny Fred. FDF: DUDE — the first Black Mountain album! Y’know? … Fuuuuck… LN: If, like Funky Donny Fred and myself, you love your stoner rock aesthetically smart, then there are really just two […]
Here’s a thrilling example of a ‘feel song,’ i.e. what happens when a band puts the sheet music away, lay off the jamming, and focus on exploring dynamics and mood atop a simple two-chord structure. It’s the means by which many a garage band seizes the mantle of “GREATEST ROCK GROUP ON EARTH” for ten […]
Save the wee hours for Shilpa Ray, when any combination of sleeplessness, inebriation and despair opens you up to the profane sentiments and black humor that existing in this doomed world requires. The Brooklyn-based songwriter has a new album out with Last Year’s Savage, the first full-length album recorded under her own name (that is, […]
These are great days for compilations of popular musics from around the world that have gone overlooked by musicologists’ reverence for traditional forms and millennials’ gravitation toward a global pop beat. However, the soundtrack to a powerful new documentary has raised the bar for this genre. Anthropological fascination meets historical urgency in Don’t Think I’ve […]
Where are the survivors of 1990s electronica? I’m thinking in particular about groups with charismatic women singers: Everything But the Girl, Portishead, Sneaker Pimps, Olive, Mono, Ivy, and all the others who turned out moody, vocal-centric dance and downtempo music. It seemed only Bjork and Goldfrapp were still plugging away productively until today, when a […]
Have half-day Fridays for the summer begun already? Because I need to catch my charter plane and reach whichever tropical paradise is featured in this video by sundown. (Okay, maybe without the surface-to-air missiles… you’ll see what I mean.) The band is Alpine, from Melbourne, Australia, and their new single, “Foolish,” is the sound of […]
A radical musical experiment lands on our laps today. Three unexpected collaborators — 70s classic rocker Todd Rundgren, dance music producer Hans-Peter Lindstrøm, and Emil Nikolaisen of Oslo shoegazers Serena-Maneesh — have created Runddans, a 39-minute work of psychedelic electronic music that aspires toward a “Good Vibrations” for the space-disco generation. “Put Your Arms Around […]
I’m not a religious person, but when I try to tell my kids why they really can’t bash each other’s heads in, why they should avoid the pull of materialism, or why evil and tragedy seem to flourish with no end in sight, I see why my own parents tried to raise me in faith. […]
In the young person’s game of indie rock, one advantage to having some years behind you is that you acquire the skills and the guts to be who you really are — to navigate through the Scylla of reinvent-the-wheel novelty and the Charybdis of herd-like “cool.” I hear that on “Heavenstay” by Shana Falana, who […]