Around the same time Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks released Real Emotional Trash, critics were deriding fellow ‘90 wunderkind Wes Anderson for straying too far from making the kind of emotional work like Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums that made him famous to go up own ass making impeccable dioramas for the lukewarmly received pastiches […]
Spoon are one of the first ballot Hall of Fame indie rock bands. They’ve an unimpeachable catalog – ten albums in 25 years – with barely a bad song in the batch. They write economical indie pop with deceptively complex rhythmic parts and gee-whiz sound effects that somehow never seem gimmicky. Every instrument in a […]
Last night, my younger sister hipped me to Chappell Roan’s “Hot to Go!” in which the 26-year-old Missourian spells out the song’s title as a come-on to a would-be suitor, offering up herself like a bag of takeout. And I was dumbstruck by how simple, effective, and catchy the line was. It’s the type of […]
THE BEST GREATEST HITS ALBUMS ARE USUALLY THE SHORTEST Do you need a greatest hits album from a band that only made three records and never had any greatest hits? Does the Pope shit in the woods? Mcluskyism is the best post-hardcore album of the 2000s. Top to bottom, minute by minute, it beats […]
Sometimes I’m like: What are we doing here? I mean as a band, as songwriters, as, ugh, artists. I sit down to work on a song and put my fingers in the same places they’ve been 100,000 times before. Oh, look, an E chord. Never heard that before. Eventually music starts to gel. […]
Before I bring a song to the band, I usually record a demo at home. It usually won’t be the version that we bring to the stage – let alone what we put on the record – but it’s normally at least 60% of the way there. I’ve learned that if you show up to […]
When we first assembled Heck Reckoners, I was listening to a lot of Preoccupations. I thought I wanted to be in a post-punk band. I was enamored with chorus, trebley bass, synthesizers, drum machines, monotony, baritone vocals, and waves of white noise. None of this took into consideration that our drummer has a rock & […]
Dubbing them the “Deleted Years,” Dave Holmes wrote for Esquire in 2019, [t]he music of the mid-aughts to early-teens is largely gone, lost down a new-millennium memory hole.” He attributes this cultural corona to the collapse of the traditional music industry (and PR machine) and the way the invention of technology (like the iPod, which […]
The first decade of the 2000s was the last in which it felt like there was a distinct divide between mainstream and independent music. On one side you had fans of Norah Jones, Christina Aguilera, and Eminem, and on the other, fans of Arcade Fire, The White Stripes, Wilco, and TV on the Radio. Those […]
I hoped King Gizzard and the Wizard Lizard’s newest album Flight b741 would feature a more concise set of songs than their recent, jammier endeavors. Well, be careful what you wish for. While the Gizz keep their songs to three or four minutes on this release (excepting a Wings-esque multipart closer), they’re…um…country rock songs. […]