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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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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It’s amazing what the exposure from being featured on the closing credits of an episode of Girls can do for you. It’s not that Broncho’s (soft “ch”) blend of garage punk with obvious pop hooks wouldn’t stand up on its own, but being christened with Lena Dunham’s seal of approval is an automatic 7″ seller. […]

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Wow, the new Bleeding Rainbow is going to be amazing, if this first single is any indication. Much more aggressive than last year’s heavily MBV-influenced Yeah Right LP. I keep playing this over and over and cannot get enough. The new record, Interrupt, is out Tuesday via Kanine.

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You think you’ve got game, and then you meet Drew Harkins and you throw the game away because you just can’t win. Deerhunter, Monomania (4AD) Pick your favorite review of this album: a.) Monomania is a willfully inscrutable/abstruse nocturnal garage pastiche of shopworn indie standards, pieced together meticulously from a post-nothing fakebook, delivered with mesmerizing […]

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February would have been a big month for James Dewitt Yancey, better known as die uberproducer J Dilla, this year, were he alive. February marks both Dilla’s birthday — he’d have been 40 on Feb. 7 — and  release date of his magnum opus Donuts, released shortly after his untimely death in 2006. Since 2007, hip-hop […]

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