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After Marvin Gaye’s family won a lawsuit against Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams for copyright infringement over the hit “Blurred Lines,” it stood to reason that similar lawsuits would follow. In late October, that suspicion came to fruition: The Minneapolis band Collage sued Bruno Mars and Mark Ronson for…
When a band releases a record that’s poorly received, it’s common for them to see it as a reason to revert. Those return-to-form albums may revisit the sound of a bygone era, but rarely, if ever, do they capture the spirit so crucial to their creation. That was the case for Metallica’s 2008 album, Death Magnetic. As a…
It’s hard not to feel a flood of gratitude for the mere existence of this record. Over the course of five albums and eight years, A Tribe Called Quest accomplished effortlessly and consistently what few others could do once. It’s an impossible ideal: ill and smart; funny and dumb; each sample pulled from some…
When is an album not an album? In 1978, the American independent label PVC Records released a Big Star LP called 3rd, which came out from the U.K.’s Aura as The Third Album, with a different track list, later that same year. Recorded in 1974, the songs on what is now known primarily as Third had been essentially…
Welcome to the Music Roundtable, where music writers and fans discuss recent reissues, hot new releases, or just records we like. For this installment, on the 30th anniversary of the Beastie Boys’ debut, Licensed To Ill, three of our writers discuss what the album looks like in the face of the Beasties’…
During the year I tried very hard to kill myself, I listened to a lot of Leonard Cohen. I’ve always been very ritualistic about sadness, particularly when it comes to music. I spent most of my sophomore year of high school, brooding over some vague adolescent angst or moping over some girl whose charms I only…
When a member of a band goes solo, it’s often assumed the artist in question is looking for a break from their normal routine. And while that’s partially true for Sadie Dupuis, the vocalist-guitarist in the indie-rock ascendants Speedy Ortiz, her first record under the Sad13 moniker doesn’t shy away from the sounds…
There have long been two sides to Martha Wainwright’s musicality: the singer-songwriter of her own distinction and the master interpreter of song. In the four years since her last solo effort, she’s seemingly emphasized the latter, playing the standards as a lounge singer in the Emmy-winning Olive Kitteridge; covering…
It’s strange that one of the most limiting musical genres has become the most open. While emo has often been viewed as a one-dimensional sound, over the past two decades it’s hewed closer to indie rock, and been more generally experimental than the hardcore scene it spawned from. The newest crop of bands—once…
The Band’s Robbie Robertson once said, “Music should never be harmless.” But since rock ’n’ roll became less taboo and, eventually, such a mainstream phenomenon that it could hardly ever be considered harmful, the danger seeped out of the genre. Increasingly, rock’s edginess became more of a posture than an actual…
Even as Derek Miller and Alexis Krauss have moved away from and fudged with the blown-out, hook-driven simplicity of their much-hyped 2010 debut full-length, Treats, they’ve mostly kept on keepin‘ on, tipping a hat to what made Sleigh Bells, well, Sleigh Bells. The foolproof template: Miller programs super beats to…
Today’s episode of Pick A Choice—starring rocker and party king Andrew W.K.—was taped before Election Day, and that will be evident once the Hillary Rodham Clinton card comes up and there is no corresponding specter of doom that hangs over the ensuing round. As chance would have it, Hillary came up last time, when…
In Under The Influence, The A.V. Club asks a musician to pair three of their songs with a non-musical influence.
Across more than two decades, the brand applied to Lambchop has shifted from “alt-country” to “chamber pop,” but both labels applied only as a matter of convenience. With no precisely accurate description for the ever-changing palette of genres—from soul to jazz to easy listening—taken up by Kurt Wagner and his…
The duo Honeyblood is frequently compared to The Jesus And Mary Chain, which is a flattering (albeit limiting and superficial) assessment. Sure, both groups hail from Scotland, and each favors fuzzy shoegaze with decidedly lo-fi tendencies. However, their paths diverge from there: Honeyblood—vocalist-guitarist Stina…
Every Friday, dozens of new records are released into the wild. Some make big splashes, and others sink almost immediately. For most music consumers, it’s almost too much information, and save for those precious few who spend their hours glued to review sites and release calendars, it’s hard to know what’s coming out…
When Carla Dal Forno began working on You Know What It’s Like, she had mostly made music in collaborative settings, with various Melbourne bands: the Flying Nun-ready punk band Mole House, the death-folk outlet Fingers, and the trippy electronic duo Tarcar. Feeling compelled to try her own hand at production, she set…
When it comes to the trappings of emotional turmoil, perhaps no subject goes so woefully overlooked as the breakup call: those bittersweet, entrail-twisting expressions of love and hate exchanged at the height of amorous delirium. It could take the form of duets screamed by exes in heat, outside the bar, the frantic…
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