Austin City Limits recently celebrated the 40th Anniversary of its first television episode — one that featured Willie Nelson and aired on October 17, 1974. Tracey E.W. Laird’s new book, Austin City Limits: A History, is a really fun read that does a fantastic job of exploring the phenomenon of ACL – not just in […]
Oh my goodness. This new song from Bent Knee pushes all of my stoner/prog rock buttons. There’s some serious weirdness here that makes more sense each time you listen. It should come as no surprise that the members of Bent Knee met at Boston’s Berklee School of Music; their song exhibits a high level of […]
Whether you mean the band or the mighty bodies of water, I’m pretty partial to Great Lakes. And, if you listen to the brand-new track “Into the Fold” by the band that shares the name of our “inland oceans,” you’ll find a few similarities between the two. Both are implacable while inexorably moving, and both […]
Despite the fact that Girls makes me want to take a nap rather than get all nostalgic for my early days in NYC, and that I rejoice at the news that many of the hipsters who helped artfully colonize this metropolis are picking up and moving upstate, thereby reminding me how content I am to […]
Your Halloween treat from Mac McCaughan this year is a cover of the title track from the first Sisters of Mercy album, which came out way back in 1985. Where Andrew Eldritch’s vocals on the original version are soaked in his typical portentous bombast, McCaughan’s rendition is more sweet and vulnerable. Still, Mac couldn’t […]
From downtempo drone to reverb-soaked classic shoegaze, the Majestic Theatre in Detroit offered everything a gracefully-aging concertgoer could want on a chilly autumn night. Minimalist mavens Low and feedback fiends Slowdive combined to offer a night to remember, lining up a night of the world’s slowest but still-inevitable one-two punch – easy to see coming […]
Being a curmudgeon can be goddamn delightful. It feels like a right earned with age, and let’s face it, the seemingly-unearned confidence of your average magical millennial—while probably as apocryphal as Gen X’s purported cynicism—is quantifiably annoying when you’re staring down the barrel of your own irrelevance. Even more annoying, the youth of today didn’t […]
Here’s a new feature where we highlight our favorite song titles from the fantastic and prolific Robert Pollard. A new one every weekday! “Dunce Codex”appears on 2011’s Robert Pollard solo record Lord of the Birdcage. Pollard took a bunch of poems he had written and made them into songs for the album, which was apparently a […]
DMA’s are three best friends from Newton, Australia. They released a single in February and have another coming next month, but that’s it so far. There’s something strangely savant-ish about these guys – they’ve hardly released any music, but it’s catchy beyond belief and they’re producing it themselves. The video for their new single “Laced” starts […]
The Brooklyn-based trio Heaven’s Jail illustrates the continuing influence of straight-ahead, AOR-style rock in that musical universe we still call “indie.” That said, they don’t brandish the guitar wizardry of your Kurt Viles and Steve Gunns, or the studio atmospherics of a Phosphorescent or the War on Drugs. Instead, Heaven’s Jail hones its guitar-driven sound […]