When the guitars first appear at the beginning of Guided by Voices’ Bee Thousand, they sound like a collection of car engines struggling to get started. It’s an alarming sound, albeit a perversely inviting one. Bee Thousand was recorded almost ...Read More
The Eagles’ Hell Freezes Over tour is the epitome of the reunion gimmick – an overwrought spectacle of a wildly over-the-hill band content parodying themselves into pop culture oblivion. But we can’t really fault the Eagles, can we? By the ...Read More
This much we know: Dan Snaith of Caribou makes groovy-as-hell music. Yet, more often than not when discussing Caribou records it’s easy to get caught up in comparisons between his dance music output and his more pop-driven work (such as ...Read More
[caption id="attachment_6559" align="aligncenter" width="380" caption="Photo courtesy of nytimes.com"][/caption] We just played, did the best we could and that was that. -Alex Chilton When I began writing this article I thought it would be best to kick it off with a quote that would ...Read More
Jeff Magnum | Courtesy of dewdoobrefhugmachine.wordpress.com You know the old cliché: sensitive singer-songwriter, foot of the bed, softly strumming on an old acoustic guitar. The mood is quiet -- but the sound of the apartment bleeds through: old wood floors, maybe ...Read More
Conceptualizing a local music scene in the contemporary cultural landscape is plausible, but it seems to romanticize days when local communities were actual physical communities. I don’t mean to say that the Internet is crushing all our hopes for face-to-face ...Read More
This is the death of auto-tune! I understand Jay-Z’s frustration, and, admittedly, I too am slightly annoyed with the overwhelmingly high amount of heavily treated vocals in pop music. Has my frustration reached the point where I am wishing its ...Read More
Owning records seems kind of redundant these days. Don’t get me wrong, I still collect albums and I prefer owning a record as opposed to just downloading it. I want to tell myself that the reasons for this extend beyond ...Read More
