Medium Rarities is Mastodon’s first odds and ends compilation. With a career spanning two decades, it seems the band would have a lot of interesting extraneous material available for this sort of release, but it turns out there really isn’t… Read More
When the world learned that President Trump had tested positive for COVID-19 in the early hours of Friday morning, his supporters reacted with dismay. The reactions of his opponents, however, were more complicated. It seemed wrong to wish this plague… Read More
The title of Staten Island-based instrumental funk group Budos Band’s upcoming 15th-anniversary album, Long in the Tooth, is a perhaps obvious but no less satisfying piece of wordplay that speaks to both the group’s longevity and style. Evocations of the… Read More
In 1988, right in the thick of what has since been canonized as hip-hop’s golden age, the trailblazing rap outfit Public Enemy issued one of the all-time musical reckonings America has ever received with sophomore album It Takes a Nation… Read More
1. “Everything in Its Right Place” I still remember where I first listened to Kid A. There aren’t many albums I can say that about, but most of us at least remember how ridiculously anticipated the album was as the follow-up… Read More
If OK Computer was Sgt. Peppers, Kid A and Amnesiac were Radiohead’s The White Album. The works are as wonderfully schizophrenic as the Beatles self-titled classic. When compared to the art-rock revelation of The Bends (arguably their Revolver) and the… Read More
It’s been ten years since Jónsi released a solo album. His 2010 debut, Go!, pointed the way as the experimental pioneer charted a course for a new sound. Go! has a much more optimistic and sunny disposition than the Sigur… Read More
“There are too many guns in America. Let your voice be your gun,” says singer-songwriter David Poe of his new single, “Gun for a Mouth”. The tune is built on sturdy rhythms that recall both the swagger of the glam… Read More
There’s something about deep, bass-heavy, musical thwack. It doesn’t matter how much one knows about house and all its micro-shoots, or whether they can speak to 1990s-era hip-hop producers such as Pete Rock or Easy Mo- Bee, sample-based geniuses who… Read More
The 2000s are a hard decade to pin down, but there does seem to be some certainty about the primacy of Radiohead’s Kid A in any discussion of the music of the period. One of the decade’s premier documents, debuting… Read More