The main question here is not “Is it good?” but “Is it necessary?” Ever since pent-up indie kids learned to stop worrying and love the Rasta, British labels like Trojan and Soul Jazz have been offering prime, pure lumber to meet the growing demand. And while it’s valuable to have…
And so we come to last call at the House of GBV, and it’s hard not to get a bit misty. For whatever indifference or disappointment greeted anything he’d made since Under the Bushes, over the years, Bob Pollard had become a bit like The Dude — we took comfort…
Luddites, fear not — Mouse on Mars has not come to alienate you. On this, their eighth full-length, the Mice instead demonstrate a keen interest in nesting within more traditional song structures. And while no one’s going to be mistaking Mouse on Mars for, say, Harry Nilsson anytime soon, Radical…
Assembled from a stockpile of 150 cassettes that turned up, inexplicably, at a public library in California, Khmer Folk & Pop is a riveting example of cultural cross-pollination. It’s also a fitting first stop for anyone still frightened off by the frou-frou “World Music” genre tag: The most interesting thing…
Go ahead and brand Junior Boys IDM (rank shorthand for “Intelligent Dance Music”). Just know that doing so would be a waste of time and precious consonants. Because what the Boys want to be are pop stars, and on their spectacular debut they manage to compress all that is right…
There’s certainly no shortage of sex in pop music. Hyperactive adolescents who, once upon a time, had to squint to make sense of a scrambled Playboy Channel can now find fulfillment from the first 30 seconds of a Nelly video. What they can’t get, though, is the technique. Enter Chicago…
Mark E. Smith: What a grouch. The grizzled limey bastard has already laid off two of the four musicians responsible for the creation of The Real New Fall LP, and is no doubt throwing the stink eye at the remaining pair. Historically, the dismissal is barely even a footnote. Smith…
But will I be lost if I haven’t heard volumes 1 through 9? Unlike most compilations, which serve as little more than friendly handshakes with a dozen unfamiliar artists, King Size Dub is better taken as a cohesive whole than as a patchwork collection of tracks. Boiling electronic music down…
When James Joyce published Ulysses in 1922, its effect on the literary community was incalculable. A sprawling tome loaded with nonsense words and run-on sentences, the novel could only be adequately understood by abandoning any pre-existing notions of fiction. Joyce’s prose operated with its own internal logic, and it had…
If there has been a single prevailing premonition over the course of the last 10 months, it’s that somewhere, somehow, everything has gone horribly wrong. The vacant malaise that was the 1990s has given way to white-knuckle terror, and quaint late-’80s boogeymen — hijacking, corporate scandal, nuclear winter — once…
It’s a sad testament to pop music that it’s arrived at a point where imitation is regularly mistaken for invention. There is little that music junkies love as much as easy reference points, and it seems the quickest way to curry both cash and credibility is to mine the familiar…
