The Sea and Cake covering “Sound and Vision” (on their last full-length over four years ago) felt like one of those duh moments, when a band re-does a song that essentially encapsulates what’s become its own stylistic M.O. The Cake’s version wasn’t anywhere near either “killing” or “owning” Bowie’s untouchable original, but it still [...]

I sincerely hope, perhaps impotently, that maybe this collection of b-sides and rarites will allow the Hieroglyphics collective—the Bay Area consortium most known for supporting Del and the Souls of Mischief during their formative (and for the Souls, their most creative and productive) years—to achieve some due recognition, outside of their rather intense online fan [...]

The wonderful Swedish psych band Dungen’s new record finally arrived in my ears a day or two ago, which normally would have caused much excitement for my head. However, it came to me the same time as Harumi, a re-released curio from the first psych era, distinguishable from many of its contemporarires by two [...]

At some point, it fell out of favor, at least among the music I listen to, for rock songs to be considered “good” if they built up toward a huge guitar solo or two as a climactic moment, or as a bridge to a song-ending chorus refrain. Enter Nels Cline, who on Wilco’s new [...]

So Sparrow House is basically Jared Van Fleet from Voxtrot, and his band’s Falls EP is such a nice surprise, and a pretty significant break from Voxtrot’s hyper-active Smiths-isms: it’s lo-fi/not lo-fi folk-pop made with all the attention to nuance and melody and atmosphere that I require from such things, in order for them to [...]

See what had happen was, Matthew told me about the “Miss You” connection before I’d even heard this song for the first time, so I can’t prove it, but I totally would have gotten it by myself, I swear. Not because I’m some sort of musical genius or whatever, but because the melody [...]

After revelling in Drought 3 for the past week or so, I’m of the mind that Lil’ Wayne is on the same level of brilliantly rampant personality contradiction as Ghostface, whose Fishscale was my favorite record of last year. As far as I’m concerned, there are no American pop stars with the sort of outsize [...]

I’m still trying to separate, after listening to With Lasers for the dozenth time, Bonde Do Role on CD from their amazing performance at the Pitchfork festival last year, which marked the first time I’d both seen and heard them. At the time, it was hard for me to imagine a more perfect environment for [...]

As a film, Grindhouse is a three-hour homage to paracinema, a genre-classification tool that, prior to a week ago, was the province of college film classes and video-store geek collectives. Important within this distinction is that the term “grindhouse” used to describe a location as much as a common filmic structure or aesthetic: specifically, [...]

This song feels like a dirty vacation. Not necessarily a bad vacation, mind you, just one that leaves a feeling of uneasiness and ickiness with the memories of warmth and relaxation, a layer of grime that no matter what, can’t be scraped off the photographs. Perhaps one of those packages advertised with everything [...]