The best promo for PJ Harvey’s ninth studio album, The Hope Six Demolition Project, came about entirely by accident. An unsuspecting Washington Post reporter published an account of the day he took a mysterious, dark-haired “musician/poet” on a tour of Washington, D.C.’s underdeveloped neighborhoods. That passenger…
It’s easy to forget that Sam Beam’s first release as Iron & Wine consisted of demos for what he intended to be a more fleshed-out record. The songs on The Creek Drank The Cradle had a particular magic in that raw and sparse state, which remained in the minds of Iron And Wine fans even as Beam marched away from quiet…
When former Ima Robot frontman Alex Ebert debuted his pseudo-folk-cult Edward Sharpe And The Magnetic Zeros with Up From Below in 2009, critics could temporarily set aside their aversion to the band’s aesthetic and concept—which was lifted from former Tripping Daisy frontman Tim DeLaughter’s pseudo-folk-cult The…
Prior to the mighty Bon Scott joining AC/DC, the Aussie rockers were fronted by Dave Evans for roughly 10 months, before he parted ways with the band. (Depending on who you ask, he was booted due to “jealousy” or disagreements with others in the camp.) Scott guided AC/DC to rock’s upper echelons before dying after a…
In Under The Influence, The A.V. Club asks a musician to pair three of their songs with a non-musical influence.
The 2016 Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame inductions took place this past Friday in New York, with acts like N.W.A., Cheap Trick, Deep Purple, Chicago, and the Steve Miller Band finally (?) landing their spots in the Cleveland institution’s darkened halls. And while it would have been easy enough to report the news of the…
Andrew W.K., the king of partying, recently came through Chicago to deliver the keynote speech at Chicago’s Pizza Summit. Given W.K.’s endless positivity, and his status as a motivational speaker, The A.V. Club thought it would be a good chance to have him merge those pursuits and give us a motivational speech about…
Frightened Rabbit came to a crossroads after a lengthy tour behind 2013’s Pedestrian Verse; months on the road left the Scottish band—particularly singer-guitarist Scott Hutchison—exhausted and creatively spent. Stepping away, Hutchison recorded an album under the name Owl John and right around the same time moved…
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 concept has changed over the years. In this installment, we cover Guns N’ Roses’ “Sweet Child O’ Mine,” which went to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 on…
Permanent Records is an ongoing closer look at the records that matter most.
Katie Rife: My musical tastes have always leaned on the “middle-aged record store clerk” side (thus my undying affection for The Replacements), but for some reason it took me until recently to get into Cheap Trick. Now that they’re being inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame, they’ve got a little more cachet.…
“I only read it for the articles,” is a popular defense of having a Playboy subscription, but for once, it rings true. Recently, the premier adult magazine moved away from full nudity for the first time since its 1953 debut issue. More impressively, though, the magazine did a total overhaul in the design department.…
Dialing back the buoyancy and bombast of the celebrated trio of albums that preceded it, Frightened Rabbit turns to a more graceful sound on Painting Of A Panic Attack. This latest project finds the veteran Scottish band at its most somber and direct, with a dozen songs that trace the group’s way through existential…
Now three years removed from Virgins—his widely touted 2013 album that is as effectively confrontational as it is contemplative—artist Tim Hecker returns with his first record for 4AD. Love Streams feels decidedly distant by comparison, less an up-close pen-and-notebook study of the complexity of sound and more an…
As much as they might play it off, Brooklyn’s Parquet Courts have become pros at making nonchalance sound calculated. From the foursome’s Light Up Gold postpunk breakout to their side game as Parkay Quarts up through their mostly vocal-less, experimental-noise foray Monastic Living, apathy reigns supreme as the…
As a devout cinephile, M83’s Anthony Gonzalez is certainly aware of the psychological concept of the suspension of disbelief. Essentially the part of one’s psyche that allows for buying into Crispin Glover’s George McFly coldcocking the prototypical bully Biff in Back To The Future, this phenomenon distills the…
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