In Minsk, the bust of Felix Dzerzhinsky — founder of the KGB — still stands. On the Island of Tears, the deaths of 771 Belarusian soldiers in Afghanistan are commemorated by a crying angel and grieving women. An obelisk hails… Read More
Electropop has many iterations, but possibly the most over-obsessed and tediously written about is the type that evokes the FM pop of the 1980s. Its revival started innocent and fun, but the critical reaction has started to turn towards vitriol.… Read More
Compared to the relatively capacious archival revelations of Can, a band with roughly comparable working practices, the posthumous pickings from This Heat have been cautiously selected and exceedingly sparse. In 1993 a three-song CD emerged – including a 33 1/3… Read More
If you’ve spent money on merchandise promoting your favorite sports team, logged hours discussing the summer blockbuster remake of a movie you and several other people on the same Internet message board liked when you were kids, or written a… Read More
London’s Tunng are the best band you still haven’t listened to, as since their 2003 inception, this collective have continued to build and folk and pop templates to create a sound that is experimental, ever-shifting, and always compelling. No two… Read More
These days it seems that all you hear in the news is about how America is divided. Understandably many see nothing but doom at the end of the road, but singer/songwriter Joan Osborne can’t help but choose hope. In Trouble… Read More
Kylie Minogue is well aware of the irony of releasing a dance-pop album called Disco during a year when going out to clubs isn’t a good idea or even a possibility. But with the release of her highly anticipated 15th… Read More
‘I hate God.’ As far as opening lines for a novel, that of Jenny Hval’s Girls Against God (translated by Marjam Idriss) certainly sounds explicit. As you go deeper into the novel, however, you realize that there is very little… Read More
Anaal Nathrakh – Endarkenment (Metal Blade) Birmingham’s Anaal Nathrakh play an extreme take on extreme metal. Everything is pushed beyond the point of breaking in their style, yet they somehow remain in control of it. By combining the most out-there… Read More
Deceit, despite its jokey title, is not a happy album. I recall my father saying to me once that he couldn’t express how it felt to live through the Cold War era. He had no language that might describe to… Read More