FIDLAR’s self-titled debut album was about as straightforward as albums come. The L.A. snot punks did drugs, got drunk, shit on humanity, and sang about it with a healthy dose of self-deprecation. They weren’t trying to change your life. They weren’t even trying to look cool. They were just being honest: Drugs and…
Recorded in just six days and boasting a relative simplicity and an arrangement largely limited to Barlow’s voice and accompanying acoustic guitar, Brace The Wave is all about honesty. This being Lou Barlow though, there are layers of overdub and guitar fuzz, so the honesty needs to be pried out of the mess every now…
In Hear This, A.V. Club writers sing the praises of songs they know well. This week: With Labor Day on the horizon, we’re once again talking about our favorite “baby” songs.
In Hear This, A.V. Club writers sing the praises of songs they know well. This week: With Labor Day on the horizon, we’re once again talking about our favorite “baby” songs.
There’s no question that Miley Cyrus’ free surprise album, Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz, is deeply flawed. At 23 tracks and 92 minutes, it’s a slog to get through. Musically, it’s often soporific—courtesy of lugubrious tempos steeped in stoned-motion psych-rock and zoned-out electronic grooves, and arrangements that…
Music videos have been in a state of recession for years now, as downturns in the music industry and the rise of low-cost, high-concept viral videos have supplanted the big-budget event video. But the one-shot music video has endured even as the music video has mostly outgrown its auteur phase. Because elaborate…
In Hear This, A.V. Club writers sing the praises of songs they know well. This week: With Labor Day on the horizon, we’re once again talking about our favorite “baby” songs.
Permanent Records is an ongoing closer look at the records that matter most.
In HateSong, we ask our favorite musicians, writers, comedians, actors, and so forth to expound on the one song they hate most in the world.
In Hear This, A.V. Club writers sing the praises of songs they know well. This week: With Labor Day on the horizon, we’re once again talking about our favorite “baby” songs.
Most of the great rock shows of my life have been small, close-up affairs with familiar variables: drunk band at a hole-in-the-wall before they hit it big, or an epic set list at a divey club that raged on past four encores, or an intimate evening with a musician and their guitar, singing stories just a few feet away.
In entertainment, an awful lot of stuff happens behind closed doors, from canceling TV shows to organizing music festival lineups. While the public sees the end product on TVs, movie screens, paper, or radio dials, they don’t see what it took to get there. In Expert Witness, The A.V. Club talks to industry insiders…
In Hear This, A.V. Club writers sing the praises of songs they know well. This week: Songs we felt we had to hide from others.
Stuff Like That There roughly simulates the second encore of a marathon Yo La Tengo show, when the casual fans and out-past-their-bedtime parents have gone home and the band indulges in affectionate covers and acoustic rarities. There’s a late-night looseness to the project that’s appealing, if not necessarily…
The press materials for Poison Season, the 11th record Dan Bejar has recorded under the name Destroyer, cite David Bowie’s chamber-pop classic Hunky Dory as an influence this time around. The touchstones—ornate strings, piano flourishes—are certainly there, but Poison Season is a looser, less-constrained affair. With…
It can be difficult to focus on the subtleties within a Beach House album—and that’s not really a dig. The Baltimore duo of Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally is so delicate and cryptic in the weaving of its dream-pop tracks that even straightforward key changes float by unnoticed, like the dried seeds of a dandelion in…
It seems fitting that The Weeknd, who built his early catalog on mystique and myth-making, opens his sophomore album, Beauty Behind The Madness, with a song called “Real Life.” His breakout 2011 mixtape trilogy—highlighted by opener House Of Balloons—capitalized on the mystery surrounding his identity, but ever since…
From the opening moments of Cranekiss, you realize that Tamaryn’s latest album is new in more ways than one. Gone are the swirling guitars and shoegaze-style rhythms—the defining qualities of her last outing, 2012’s Tender New Signs. In their place are an assemblage of synths and drum machines, all chugging away…
In Hear This, A.V. Club writers sing the praises of songs they know well. This week: Songs we felt we had to hide from others.
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