Here in the dead of winter, the last thing on most Chicagoans’ minds is “music festival.” But in a city already saturated with summer concerts, and boasting a notoriously long cold, gray season, it was a brilliant move by Pitchfork and The Art Institute Of Chicago to organize Midwinter, a three-day event bringing…
One of the best things about old records is the liner notes. Pick up a jazz or pop LP of a certain vintage and you’re damn near guaranteed to run straight into a wall of hyperbolic poetry on the back of the sleeve. Nobody on this earth hard-sells as shamelessly as old-school liner-note writers. Their copy is ecstatic…
Ariana Grande has had a rough few years, starting with the tragic 2017 Manchester Arena bombing after her concert there and concluding with the dissolution of her engagement to actor Pete Davidson in October of last year. In between, Grande also split from her long-term boyfriend, rapper Mac Miller, who passed away…
Tonight, The Recording Academy will honor Dolly Parton as the 2019 MusiCares Person of the Year with a tribute at the Los Angeles Convention Center. In conjunction, the 47-time Grammy nominee is being honored with an exhibit at the Grammy Museum titled “Diamond In A Rhinestone World: The Costumes Of Dolly Parton.”…
There’s a lot of music out there. To help you cut through all the noise, every week The A.V. Club is rounding up A-Sides, five recent releases we think are worth your time. You can listen to these and more on Spotify.
As cats domesticated themselves, it was inevitable that they’d take over our music, too. At least as far back as the Baroque era, they’ve been purring their way into our songs: Domenico Scarlatti’s “Sonata G Minor (Cat’s Fugue)” was inspired by his cat, Pulcinella, stomping across his keyboard, the 17th-century…
There’s a lot of music out there. To help you cut through all the noise, every week The A.V. Club is rounding up A-Sides, five recent releases we think are worth your time. You can listen to these and more on Spotify.
As the wave of spring album announcements continues to build, it’s easy to overlook the solid lineup of releases here to keep us warm in the dead of winter. February brings a ton of great indie music, with Beirut, Girlpool, Cass McCombs, and Panda Bear all returning with new full-lengths. And it’s a particularly…
It’s not just cold out there, folks—it’s goddamn freezing. Not only here in the Midwest, but all across North America, flights are grounded, businesses closed, and generally we’re all forced inside for the next 24 hours or so. To help you—and us—get through it, The A.V. Club has compiled a Spotify playlist of winter…
There’s a lot of music out there. To help you cut through all the noise, every week The A.V. Club is rounding up A-Sides, five recent releases we think are worth your time. You can listen to these and more on Spotify.
Despite his Grammy nods and Mercury Prizes, his high-profile collaborations with glitterati, James Blake is not so much a pop star as he is pop dark matter—a mysterious, almost hypothetical energy between the stars, enclosing them in an icy-hot medium of crepuscular electronic music and molten vocalization. The…
Mark Mothersbaugh’s career spans five decades, starting with the formation of new wave bad Devo in 1973. Since then, Mothersbaugh has made the jump to Hollywood composing, lending his musical talents to Thor: Ragnarok, Disenchantment, the upcoming The Lego Movie 2, and the Bravo show Dirty John. We recently had the…
There’s a lot of music out there. To help you cut through all the noise, every week The A.V. Club is rounding up A-Sides, five recent releases we think are worth your time. You can listen to these and more on Spotify.
Sharon Van Etten’s transformative fifth studio album, Remind Me Tomorrow, kicks off with a lyrical sucker punch: “Sitting at the bar, I told you everything / You said, ‘Holy shit. You almost died.’” To emphasize the gravity of the interaction, Van Etten slowly draws out each syllable, as funereal piano chords provide…
The conceit of Deerhunter’s eighth full-length, Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared?, is that it’s a science-fiction album about the present—the glorious, anxiety-ridden, fear-laden present. It may not be the case that people are more scared than they’ve ever been, though one could make a great argument for it.…
They said it couldn’t be done. They said it wouldn’t be done. They said it shouldn’t be done. But the Year In Band Names is back, if a little belated and slightly different. This year, I cut way more bands from my master list than usual, in an effort to leave only the noteworthy groups (or ones that made for fun…
There’s a lot of music out there. To help you cut through all the noise, every week The A.V. Club is rounding up A-Sides, five recent releases we think are worth your time. You can listen to these and more on Spotify.
In 1976, filmmaker Barbara Kopple released Harlan County U.S.A., a documentary delving into Kentucky coal miners’ 1973 Brookside Strike against the Eastover Coal Company and its larger corporate owners. Critics largely regarded the film as an instant classic, with Kopple receiving an Oscar for Best Documentary…
2018 may be receding in the rearview, but some of last year’s most anticipated music releases are riding shotgun into this one: My Bloody Valentine, Vampire Weekend, Sky Ferreira, Solange. Because we’ve covered our excitement for these before—sometimes multiple times—we’ve left some of them off the list below to make…
There’s a certain vintage of mainstream country music that still widely resonates: Merle Haggard, Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson, George Jones, Emmylou Harris. There’s also a lot of country music that’s widely derided, particularly in the years that country music rapidly expanded beyond its Americana roots and began…
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