In other bizarre, unexpected reunion news, Minneapolis’ Babes in Toyland have announced its first shows in 18 years. I first saw BIT when I was in high school at a tiny club in Nashville, and it scared the ever-living shit out of me. Ket Bjelland’s manic stage presence is not for the faint of heart. […]

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St. Vincent’s self-titled fourth record is without a doubt in my top ten for the year. Her music is an idiosyncratic mix of post-Bowie stylized weirdness, syncopated, dance-able rhythms, and off-kilter guitar bravado. There is no one in her league. Her lyrics are intellectual and articulate with the requisite amount of oddness to match the […]

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I’m always completely torn when a band I worship – or have worshiped – decides to reunite. Of course, there’s the selfish desire to relive the nostalgic emotions a certain record may have evoked during the formative teenage years. But then there’s the cynical desire to understand the invariably disappointing motivation, which always points to […]

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Johnny Jewel has been unearthing a slew of Chromatics jams lately on his SoundCloud page. Not sure to what end but since it’s been a minute since the last Chromatics full length, these scraps are making up for lost time. “White Light” is brocade of wispy synths, over-reverbed guitar, and the requisite ethereal vocals.

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Unless you have God-given perfect pitch, singing live is no easy feat. So many variables with which to contend. If you can’t hear yourself, you’re totally effed. So, I feel slightly bad about posting this, but at the same time I love these isolated tracks when they show up on YouTube because, you know, trainwrecks […]

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I can’t be sure how deliberate it was, but Iceage‘s new sound is the smartest career move I’ve seen from a band in a long time. What makes it so utterly genius is the fact that it sounds so natural and uncontrived. Iceage could have easily fallen into the “bands that could have been” heap […]

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Last week, Mark Kozelek seemingly joked that he’d written a song called “War on Drugs: Suck My Cock.” “I challenge War On Drugs to let me join them onstage and play a hilarious song I’ve written called ‘War On Drugs: Suck My Cock/Sun Kil Moon: Go Fuck Yourself’ at the Fillmore, October 6,” Kozelek wrote […]

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