In Hear This, A.V. Club writers sing the praises of songs they know well. This week: Songs with prominent harmonica usage.

My World Of Flops is Nathan Rabin’s survey of books, television shows, musical releases, or other forms of entertainment that were financial flops, critical failures, or lack a substantial cult following.

Not long after Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel De Homem-Christo started recording and performing as the house music duo Daft Punk, they began wearing masks during their public appearances, adding a sense of mystery and theater to a genre where the real show was often in the audience instead of on the stage. But it…

Though Motörhead had to cancel a few shows at the beginning of the month due to singer Lemmy Kilmister’s health, the band is back on the road and rocking as hard as ever. The international tour is in support of Bad Magic, their latest album, which hit shelves at the end of last month. When we asked Kilmister what fans…

In Hear This, A.V. Club writers sing the praises of songs they know well. This week: Songs with prominent harmonica usage.

Record labels hated them. (So did Neil Young.) Fans loved them. (So did the Stones.) Bootleg records played an important, though ambiguous, role in the music world during the rock era. (You can find The A.V. Club’s history of bootlegging here.) On one hand, they were technically illegal, the people who made them…

People have been making recordings of performances by musical artists without their knowledge or permission for years, but the first recognized, wide-release bootleg to hit the underground-store shelves came in the summer of 1969. Titled Great White Wonder, it was released by Trademark Of Quality Records, a label set…

In Hear This, A.V. Club writers sing the praises of songs they know well. This week: Songs with prominent harmonica usage.

In Set List, we talk to veteran musicians about some of their most famous songs, learning about their lives and careers, and maybe hearing a good backstage anecdote or two in the process.

In Hear This, A.V. Club writers sing the praises of songs they know well. This week: Songs with prominent harmonica usage.

Ryan Adams goes wherever his muse directs him, which explains why he’s just as likely to release a hardcore EP as he is an alt-country masterpiece. But when news broke that he had decided to put his own spin on Taylor Swift’s 1989 (and was interpreting it in the style of the Smiths, no less), it was one of his more…

In Hear This, A.V. Club writers sing the praises of songs they know well. This week: Our favorite songs featuring unusual instruments.

Long gone are the days of Metric, the sassy indie-rock quartet with downtown New York style and angular guitar riffs. After abandoning its edges for the glossier pop perfectionism of Fantasies, the group’s last effort lived up to its Synthetica title, transitioning the band into more synthpop sounds and dance-floor…

Vintage, dusty synthesizers are quite a departure for Michael Benjamin Lerner, a.k.a. Telekinesis. Essentially scrapping the power pop signifiers of his first three LPs, Lerner’s predilection for motorik beats and washes of analog synths are initially jarring throughout Ad Infinitum. Yet once you get past the surprise…

How has it taken this long for Lucero to record a song called “Went Looking For Warren Zevon’s Los Angeles?” Like Zevon, Lucero’s singer-songwriter Ben Nichols works within a country-rock style that favors ballads as much as rave-ups, with simple melodies that are sneakily catchy. And Nichols too has a Zevon-like way…

As rap progresses through middle age, coping mechanisms among veterans still in the game have been mixed: Some gloat about their success like nothing has changed (Jay Z); some have gotten nostalgic about their breakout years (Eminem); some have deliberately shed any semblance of an edge (Wu-Tang Clan). Amid a surge in…

In Hear This, A.V. Club writers sing the praises of songs they know well. This week: Our favorite songs featuring unusual instruments.

In Set List, we talk to veteran musicians about some of their most famous songs, learning about their lives and careers, and maybe hearing a good backstage anecdote or two in the process.

For 35 years now, Greg Graffin and his band Bad Religion have always stood for an element of punk rock that saw itself as being as much about critical thinking and challenging accepted norms of society as it has been about music. With his debut book, Anarchy Evolution, Graffin attempted to outline some of the…

The Replacements were always their own greatest fans and worst enemies. In a shockingly short number of years, this Minneapolis four-piece got out of the garage, shook but never really broke free of their punk roots, lost a member to substance abuse, landed a major-label deal, and broke up dramatically on stage in…