PJ Harvey’s insanely brief tour promoting White Chalk at least allowed for one national television appearance, so the rest of us, who don’t live in L.A. or New York, could see what she’s up to. So, for her performance on Jay Leno Tuesday night, she was draped in black and played alone with an autoharp, […]

[Read more →]

Saw The Shins last night in Charleston, SC at The Plex. What a shit venue. It’s an old movie theater that has been converted into a swamp of heat and smoke with no incline backing away from the stage. And parking was a total nightmare clusterfuck. Not the band’s fault, of course, and all was […]

[Read more →]

My favorite Swede, Jens Lekman, recently stopped by the WNYC studios to chat and play a track from his new album, Night Falls over Kortedala, as well as a cover of Paul Simon, sans Chevy Chase?!. (From the new record: Friday Night at the Drive-in Bingo)

[Read more →]

Blender’s lists always need to be taken with an extra grain of salt, but this one  sort of semi-accurately collects a handful of the some of the worst offenders. The order just seems a bit jumbled. I mean Sting certainly has over-stepped the bounds of pretentiousness on more than one occasion (name-dropping Nabokov was bad enough, but mispronouncing it […]

[Read more →]

The Catbird seat has done your homework and mocked your blog by compiling the projected nominees for the ever-predictable, year-end best-of lists. Everyone knows these lists are meaningless and arbitrary, but everyone seems to compile them anyway. So, if you’ve been lazy this year and want to make sure you’re catering to fleeting tastes of […]

[Read more →]

While the following words should’ve been an intertitle in that Van Hagar video where Eddie shows us he can wank off just as hard on the ivories, unfortunately they’re not: Riiight now, somewhere in the Stuyvesant Heights section of Brooklyn, a pandrogyne noise pioneer is cursing God and weeping uncontrollably – unsure if s/he can […]

[Read more →]

So, it’s not quite the X-rated debauchery it was hyped to be, but Duran Duran’s new video for “Falling Down”, the first single off the forthcoming Red Carpet Massacre, is indeed a head-scratcher. I’m not sure I have the plot straight, but a sleaze bag in a limo drops off his girlfriend at some sort […]

[Read more →]