Shonen Knife has been a cult favorite since the mid-’80s, but the Japanese trio made some moves into the mainstream in the early ’90s the way a few bands did—by finding a champion in Kurt Cobain. Shonen Knife and Nirvana toured together a couple of times, and brought Cobain to tears nearly every night with their…

Endorsements of Francis And The Lights come from way up the pop-music power structure: Ever since Drake drafted the electro-pop act to produce a track for Thank Me Later, Francis Farewell Starlite (it’s his legal name, no joke) has popped up on stage and on record with Bon Iver and Chance The Rapper, and no less than…

The best lyric in Carly Rae Jepsen’s best song on her top-notch Emotion: Side B goes, “You pulled a gem out of a mess / I’m blessed / So cynical before, I must confess.” It’s hard to imagine Jepsen ever being cynical; she entered our lives crooning “Call Me Maybe,” a song so upbeat it could have been written by a…

It’s hard to say who inspired it. Let’s Get Out Of This Terrible Sandwich Shop? Test-Icicles? Snatches Of Pink?

Horror has a surfeit of great scores. Composers have turned in soundtracks to films that non-fans likely never even realize possess them. And for those of us who can hum the themes to various killers and iconic scenes from memory, the chance to treat our ears to these compositions apart from their source material can…

It is hard to say whether it was always a game of chess, but if it were, Childish Gambino, a.k.a. Donald Glover, had the game plan all along. How does one go from being known as a comedian, a writer on 30 Rock, and an actor on Community to a multifaceted star in the truest sense? Take a hiatus from comedy to focus on…

Making you mosh isn’t high on the list of Oranssi Pazuzu’s priorities. There are plenty of other metal bands—stronger, faster, straighter ones—that can scratch that itch. This Finnish five-piece aims higher, past the pit and into the cosmos. Its fourth LP, Värähtelijä, plays like the soundtrack to an interstellar…

Photo: Chiaki Nozu/Getty Images

“The most magnificent spectacle ever encountered in the world of rock,” Melody Maker called Kate Bush’s first stage show in 1979. Using magic, mime, and video, the Tour Of Life was unlike anything seen before on the concert stage and in many ways pioneered the dynamic multimedia concert shows so standard today. Bush…

When Telefon Tel Aviv’s debut album, Fahrenheit Fair Enough, was first released back in 2001, there was little indication it would stand the test of time quite this well. Initially considered a lesser imitator of late-’90s glitch purveyors wedded to the jazz-influenced Chicago post-rock scene, Joshua Eustis and…

This week’s questions comes from reader Kip Mooney:

To say a band is maturing can come across as patronizing, as though to suggest that its previous albums weren’t fully formed or well-rendered, or that its work were the result of youthful foibles or dalliances. So let’s say that with this year’s Human Performance, Parquet Courts aren’t maturing so much as evolving.…

From its unplanned founding to its improvised, single-take recording process, Exploded View is a band built on chance. Initially uniting to flesh out solo shows by Berlin-based singer Anika (of Stones Throw, BEAK>) while she was on tour in Mexico City, the four-piece sparked to an energy and aesthetic they knew they…

As The A.V. Club has done every year since 2006, we present a bewilderingly thorough list of funny, bad, funny-bad, or otherwise notable band names we encountered over the past year. As usual, it’s a glorious patchwork of genres and intentions, from deadly serious metal bands plumbing medical dictionaries for…

Vaporwave felt like an exhausting inside joke before it even started, an internet-spawned musical genre that, to the uninitiated, can feel like landing on the 64th page of a three-year-old message board discussion, where the replies have long since collapsed into granular disagreements and tangential squabbling. It…

The Weeknd (a.k.a. Abél Tesfaye) only sees possibilities, not limitations, where his music is concerned. The Canadian producer-songwriter’s official label debut, 2012’s Trilogy, was a triple album compiling his eclectic early mixtapes, while 2015’s hit Beauty Behind The Madness LP took a loose, expansive approach to…

As rock bands set on changing the world go, U2 has actually followed through and done some tangible good for important humanitarian causes. That doesn’t negate the fact that, for many, its sermonizing on the mount can be a turnoff. I felt that during one of the last times I saw the band in concert, where the sight of…

In the wake of the recent presidential election, there’s been plenty of chatter about how this negative outcome will positively affect music and art, with much of the focus on punk rock. It makes sense, given that punk’s always been a conduit for political outrage, whether it’s overt or minute. But as music critic Jess…

In Expert Witness, The A.V. Club talks to industry insiders about the actual business of entertainment in hopes of shedding some light on how the pop-culture sausage gets made.

It’s the fourth Wednesday of the month, which means it’s time for The A.V. Club’s ongoing video series with Oregon’s Pickathon festival. While last month we brought in the sunshine with the legendary King Sunny Adé, this month we’re mentally venturing down to North Carolina, where Mount Moriah resides. In the clip…