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 […]
If there’s a moment that sums up why Gwen Stefani is so eternally beloved, it’s the surreal scene from The Voice last fall when she led her team through New Radicals’ “You Get What You Give” in a swirl of confetti. Only Stefani could sound so perky while threatening to… Source: RollingStone Link: This Is […]
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 […]