I could start this by making some claim as to the unique aura of the concert experience, especially in a technological era when so much music is so very invisible. But I won’t. I’ll just get straight into it. I’ve been asking some of my blogger friends, and some other Internet-esque people who [...]

Let me first begin my making the perhaps bold pronouncement that Like Father, Like Son is leagues (leagues, I say) better than the pretty good (but ultimately too mixtapey) Dedication 2 from earlier this year. Seriously, if you’re looking to buy a seriously great rap record right now, this is the one. Its [...]

Ten Kens are from Toronto, so odds are they’ll be indie-famous after their record comes out, because it’s pretty solid through and through, has memorable tunes and a definite dramatic flair that should find a hook with a lot of current indie dudes. At this point, though, the band is still in that pre-promotional [...]

It’s probably a little bit of an understatement to say that I was pleasantly surprised when I popped “Practicing Preachers” (mp3), emailed to me by a member of the band about a week or so ago, into my iTunes, to be greeted with something that sounded like it was casually recorded during a random [...]

The fact that a guy like Terry Manning even got to release his own album, let alone on Stax, testifies to the unique state of the record industry in the late Sixties and early Seventies, where smaller, subsidiary labels could be headed by iconoclasts looking to diversify their rosters and take chances on relative unknowns. [...]

I’m sure there are thousands more 7 inch singles sitting unlistened in record stores all across the British Isles, containing close to entire discographies from bands that broke up before putting out a full-length, or were a side project and never got around to worrying about things like that. So when singles comps like [...]

It’s been 40 years since the release of the Mothers of Invention’s Freak Out!, and the BBC4 has taken the opportunity to compile a 27-ish minute (and very Greer-ish) retrospective, more on Zappa than on the record, but whatever. It would have been nice to hear a detailed recollection of the album’s recording process, [...]

Ever Nalens is the person behind A Sunny Day in Glasgow, one of the most interesting and amazing musical projects I’ve heard this year. He, along with a few collaborators, contstructs dense fogs of sound that find the most interesting, ethereal vocal melodies and sharp, dissonant rhythms pushing through. When he sent me [...]

I really wish we could make this song the American national anthem, just for the length of one baseball season. Just think about how fucking great it would be to see a full ensemble of tribal drummers (go ahead and stand up and play the imaginary drums yourself, you know you want to) out there [...]

On “Save Room” (mp3), John Legend has for whatever reason excised any traditionally recognizable remnant of soul from his voice (of the smidgen that was originally there, admittedly) and replaced it with a simulacrum (er, a “soulmalacrum” ha ha) of David Clayton-Thomas from Blood, Sweat and Tears. However, the facts that there are 1.) [...]