Celebrating Community
Ren’s virtual genius. The death of the music industry is both often reported and greatly exaggerated, but what mystifies me is how seemingly popular artists are making money. It’s not through streaming, that’s well established, but with little for sale it’s hard to see just how the income comes in. Take the at least occasionally brilliant singer Raury. His song […]
Islands, mountains and valley girls. LA’s Death Valley Girls have released a couple of singles since 2020’s Under the Spell of Joy, and those songs have found a happy home on Islands in the Sky, the band’s fifth full-length. “When I’m Free” was the flip of Le Butcherettes cover of their “The Universe,” and it was a perfect pairing of […]
2-Tone in 2023. In December, the voice of the British ska revival was silenced. The wave began with the Specials in 1979, brilliantly conceived not as a band so much as a movement by Jerry Dammers, whose ouster not long after led to the splintering and eventual demise of the greatest of the 2-Tone bands. Dammers was the mastermind and […]
Todd Field’s Tár begins, essentially, with the end credits: dozens of names in white scrolling over a black background. It could be taken as an indication that it’s time to go home. Once the credits are done, things don’t pick up. The first third of the movie is belligerent in its boringness. It sets up the titular, successful orchestra conductor […]
With Dry Cleaning’s second album released in October—building on the unexpected success of their infectious 2021 debut New Long Leg—and the subsequent (and harder to fathom) popularity of Wet Leg’s chatty single “Chaise Lounge,” it seems what I want to call the talkcore movement’s got, you know, legs. Dublin’s Fontaines D.C. and Yard Act out of Leeds are more closely […]
Black paint (by numbers). The highlight of Liturgy’s set at First Unitarian Congregational Society in Brooklyn Heights last July (the first time the band ever played in a church, as frontperson Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix announced from the stage) was a monumental, pounding and then-unreleased 20-minute song which, it turns out, will be the title track of their next album, due in the […]
Almighty Aaron. Back in the early naughts, the mighty Isis was a vital force in defining what has since become known as post-metal with their long, slowly developing, often largely instrumental compositions. It’s been a dozen years since they parted ways, and guitarist Aaron Turner has followed the path the band forged in differing directions, most notably with the band […]
Too much paranoias. When in need of squeaky thin organ-driven new wave of late, I often turn to the endearing L.A. four-piece the Paranoyds. The fashionista four-piece (they call themselves an “eyebrow band”) is generally just the right mix of quirky, sarcastic and sick of it. Their first album, 2019’s Carnage Bargain, got some attention with the singles “Girlfriend Degree” […]
Lucifer on the dancefloor. A new of Montreal album is always a time of revelry—nobody does dark disco quite like Kevin Barnes. For a while, though, the albums have run thin fairly quickly for me. That’s not necessarily a problem; there’s far too much pop in the world for all of it to be permanent. But for a songwriter who […]
The Long Play festival, which ran in various venues around downtown Brooklyn from April 29 to May 1, was created to replace the previous Bang on a Can marathon, an annual single-stage daylong free presentation usually in Manhattan. Over three days at 10 venues, more than 60 acts represented a mix of contemporary composition, jazz-based improvisation and updatings of folk […]