It’s a perfectly reasonable plan of PR attack to spin a new album from a fledgling songwriter as a collaboration with a seasoned musician and producer. Fine and dandy, makes sense. Because John Vanderslice is much more of a name—in more ways than one—than Jamison, the surname-less musician from Abbotsford, British…
In Hear This, A.V. Club writers sing the praises of songs they know well. This week: our favorite songs that come in at over 10 minutes long.
In the most celebrated quote in a career full of them, Public Enemy’s Chuck D once proclaimed hip-hop as “CNN for black America”—a statement that’s cut both ways for the group. From its very conception, Public Enemy did promise a more honest, street-level reporting on black life than most of its rap contemporaries,…
In Hear This, A.V. Club writers sing the praises of songs they know well. This week: our favorite songs that come in at over 10 minutes long.
Version Tracker examines how different artists have performed the same song over the years, adapting it to suit their own needs and times.
In Hear This, A.V. Club writers sing the praises of songs they know well. This week: our favorite songs that come in at over 10 minutes long.
Dr. Dre is one of the architects of West Coast rap and a pillar of hip-hop production. He is responsible for producing a large portion of California’s great gangsta rap catalog and for pioneering G-Funk, a bold re-envisioning of traditional funk sampling. After rising to prominence as the de facto leader of N.W.A.,…
In Hear This, A.V. Club writers sing the praises of songs they know well. This week: our favorite songs that come in at over 10 minutes long.
Between November of 1984 and November of 1985, Scottish indie-pop act The Jesus And Mary Chain blended pretty melodies and abrasive noise across four singles and a debut LP, Psychocandy. In that first flourish of activity, the JAMC churned out more songs than it could use, including the fan-favorite “Some Candy…
Chelsea Wolfe has made an album the unites all her previous work, and then turns the dial up as far as it will go. Abyss, the new record from California’s foremost purveyor of goth/doom/folk/ambient/(insert multifarious modifiers here), sounds like a combination of the many different muses Wolfe has turned to…
Everything that was once considered cool or cutting edge almost always comes back around again. It happened with leg warmers, it happened with acid-wash jeans, and now La Luz is helping to bring back early ’60s surf rock. It’s odd to think that a group based out of Seattle—Puget Sound is not a place particularly…
Frank Turner’s early albums were filled with blustery folk-punk, his lyrics blunt and certain, perfect for his steadily building fist-pumping crowds that sang along with every word. He grabbed the mantle of Billy Bragg and Joe Strummer with his rousing songs, defiant punk poetry (“I won’t sit down / I won’t shut up /…
In the musical world of Mac DeMarco, nothing is ever quite as it seems. His music exists in a sort of hyper-relaxed, escapist milieu, but lyrically he’s weighed down by an emotional anchor. This juxtaposition has served the idiosyncratic DeMarco well on past efforts, never more so than on 2014’s excellent Salad Days.…
Hatched a decade ago from within the underground incubator of famed Los Angeles DIY venue The Smell, Health first made its reputation as a relentless noise-rock band. It was less interested in decimating a stage with blown-out, thick riffs and red-faced rage than it was in gnawing scenery to shreds with razor-edged,…
Permanent Records is an ongoing closer look at the records that matter most.
In We’re No. 1, The A.V. Club examines a song that went to No. 1 on the Billboard charts to get to the heart of what it means to be popular in pop music, and how that has changed over the years. In this installment, we cover The Rolling Stones’ “Brown Sugar,” which spent two weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100…
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