“Holy Roller” was the first song that Thao Nguyen wrote for We The Common, her new album as Thao & The Get Down Stay Down. The jittery indie-folk tune was also the first song we heard from the album, and now it’s the first one to get a video. In director Mimi Cave‘s clip, Nguyen [...]
The National’s release their new album Trouble Will Find Me yesterday (5/21) and played two intimate NYC show to celebrate. They made an early evening stop at Brooklyn’s Public Assembly and closed out their night in Manhattan at Mercury Lounge. We sent intrepid photog Daniel Topete to check out their BK gig. You can also [...]
Stuff like this is the reason the A.V. Club’s “A.V. Undercover” video series exists: Louisville post-hardcore warriors Coliseum, who landed a recent Album Of The Week with their ferocious Sister Faith, covering “Shakin’,” a deeply silly piece of ’80s cheeseball-rock fluff by Eddie Money. You will not be shocked to learn that the band turned [...]
TV Girl’s chugging “She Smokes In Bed” is cautionary tale. While it’s as upbeat as can be, its narrative is not so bright. The track’s protagonist, Mary, is keen on taking her cigarettes too close to bedtime and, well, you’ll have to listen to the song to see how things end for her. It comes [...]
“Alive,” the new single from Aussie synthpoppers Empire Of The Sun is as much a grand and absurd spectacle. as it is a song; the group made good and sure of that with the video. They’re all over the festival circuit this summer, which means they’ll play the song live a fuckton of times. And [...]
Jobs were passed down generationally between strangers. One guy became an editor at a magazine, but used to be a music buyer at Mondo Kim’s on St. Marks. My friend got the job and started a shoegaze band with a tall guy named Brad that had a huge beard and a couple large cats. Brad [...]
The Chicago rapper/producer Tree calls his style “soul-trap,” and that’s a better genre descriptor than a critic nerd like me could come up with. Seen from a certain angle, Tree is an inheritor to his city’s Common/early Kanye conscious-rap throne. His music can be placid and thoughtful, full of doomed narrative and poverty-contemplation and emotional [...]
It is yet another #WACKWEDNESDAY for the Lonely Island and today they’ve released an attempted-grammar lesson called “SEMICOLON” featuring guest vocals from Solange. Utilizing the Drake-popularized lyrical device of hashtag rap (example: “we run the game; umpire”), the four try to explain how the polarizing punctuation mark works. Except they do not at all and [...]
The promotion for Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories was innovative, but it’s certainly rivaled by the mysterious roll-out for Boards Of Canada’s first album in seven years, Tomorrow’s Harvest. The first preview of new music came via six single edition 12″s released on Record Store Day that went from a crate-digger’s goldmine to being sold [...]
One of the things I remember most from this year’s SXSW isn’t a particular artist, a showcase, or party. It’s a Daft Punk billboard. During that week, rumors had slowly swirled around Austin about the possibility of the French electronic duo performing at a secret location (which, to my knowledge, never actually happened). But the [...]
