PJ Harvey’s ninth solo album is a set of folk and blues op-ed journalism – following an activist impulse for this usually inward-looking artist that began on her last album, 2011’s Let England Shake. “Now you see them, now you don’t/Faces, limbs, a bouncing skull,” she sings against rushing acoustic guitars, braying sax… Source: RollingStone Link: The Hope […]
M83’s Anthony Gonzalez has always had a flair for the cinematic. But after drafting 15 years worth of synthy film scores for the conventionally-attractive young adults of his fantasies, Gonzalez found more down-to-earth inspiration for his band’s latest, mining his childhood memories for musical influences. What emerged is a semi-autobiographical work, flippantly titled… Source: RollingStone Link: Junk
“Tangled In A Dream.” “Disintegration Anxiety,” “Losing the Light.” Explosions in the Sky songs might not have lyrics but it’s never hard to tell where they’re coming from. The expansive Texas band’s instrumental indie-rock sound-sculpting is wrought from a sense of somber apprehension and drift, of possibility coming into focus… Source: RollingStone Link: The Wilderness
“There’s a strange new godless demon awake inside of me,” Deftones vocalist Chino Moreno sings at the start of the band’s eighth album. But if the lyrics suggest demonic possession, his honey-toned delivery seems more suited to suited to separating a prospective sexual partner from their clothes. It’s a startling… Source: RollingStone Link: Gore
The Weezer cult will always rest on the band’s 1996 overshare masterpiece, Pinkerton, where Rivers Cuomo bared his soul about his fears and fantasies, sniffing a teenage Japanese girl’s fan letters and drooling over cello players. Latter-day Weezer fans understandably cherish the myth that Pinkerton was reviled by the adult… Source: RollingStone Link: Weezer
Arctic Monkeys frontman Alex Turner has been chronicling late-night disaffection for a decade. But he’s come a long way musically from the Monks’ early machine-gun guitar charge. The second album he’s made with buddy Miles Kane as Last Shadow Puppets is drowsily gorgeous, soft-focus California burnout, á la Beck and… Source: RollingStone Link: Everything You've […]
Zayn Malik has had sex. But he doesn’t just want that fact to be implied in his lyrics or ingrained in his music. The 23-year-old ex-One Direction member wears it like a Boy Scout badge, placing himself between sheets and against walls time and time again. His solo re-introduction is a… Source: RollingStone Link: Mind of […]
Truth lies in the details – and that goes double for tradition-minded country music, a point Margo Price’s debut makes fiercely. In “About to Find Out,” a Loretta Lynn-styled can of whoopass, it’s the image of a selfie-snapping jackass fast-forwarding the song into the present. In the honky-tonk hangover “Hurtin’ (On The… Source: RollingStone Link: Midwest Farmer's […]
There’s a famous early-Seventies Mick Rock photo of Iggy Pop – wild-eyed in a T. Rex -T-shirt, a pack of Lucky Strikes clamped between his teeth – with his arms around David Bowie and Lou Reed: together, the troika who smacked rock & roll out of its hippie daze and… Source: RollingStone Link: Post Pop […]
In the fall of 2014, an expansive group of artists – from Brian Wilson to Butch Walker – got together for two concerts in Los Angeles honoring George Harrison. George Fest is a concert album put on by Best Fest, the traveling tribute-show series that has convened all-star tributes to Bob… Source: RollingStone Link: George Fest: […]