If, in fifty years, a single thing comes to define our current generation of artists and musicmakers, it will be the steady tearing down of walls between genres. A close runner-up will be a lingering backward glance, one that of…
Tom Petty, The Great Balancer
As time marches, it becomes all too easy to forget the sheer volume of greatness that existed in rock throughout the 1970s and 80s. So much of the music of the era continues to dominate the collective consciousness, even as,…
Album Review: Sparks – Hippopotamus
Listening to Sparks is not at all unlike seeing a hippopotamus at the zoo. Each entity is big, kind of weird looking, even weirder sounding, and yet likable, in a way that your conscious mind might not immediately be able…
Album Review: Brand New – “Science Fiction”
Consider the career of any accomplished artist and you’ll find they’ve been held, at some time or another, to a fickle standard: growth. This most unruly of moving goal posts plagues artists, of any medium or genre, the moment it…
Album Review: Baio – “Man of the World”
Since 2013’s Modern Vampires of the City, an emotionally nuanced album of myriad sonic moods, Vampire Weekend has been on something of a hiatus, but not one in which the band as individuals have experienced much quiet. From solo albums…
Album Review: Jeff Tweedy – “Together At Last”
It’s inherently unsettling to hear the words “I dreamed about killing you again last night.” Such is the tone set from the get-go on Jeff Tweedy’s Together At Last. The album is effectively a retrospective of the songwriter’s long career,…
Album Review: Portugal. The Man – “Woodstock”
There are few, if any, other single events in American pop music more venerated than the original Woodstock Music and Arts Fair. As a watershed moment in the cultural revolution of the 1970s, occurring in the last month of the…
