If we were judging music objectively then Death Cab for Cutie’s The Open Door EP would be considered one of the 10 best rock records of this century. In 2009, I was watching The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien and found myself at the part of the show where the musical guest comes out, which […]

I got the idea for this post and I was going to set it up like an examination of how in recent years there is no reliable publication or magazine that’s read widely by the public and trusted for music taste. But then I started thinking back. I started thinking about Rolling Stone and its […]

It’s been nice, lately, by the way, to see both of these musical styles have their identities emphatically stamped with approval in new music, with BEANS compiling a rich album in All Together Now that brings the psychedelia of the Beatles to an updated, tense and Enon-approximating indie territory, and Portland’s Era Bleak bellowing out […]

In the spring of 1997, I was in seventh grade, a whiz on the viola, light and lithe on my feet and stricken dumb for this girl I’d talk to on the phone that summer and hang out with at the pool. It was clear: I was just too nice. I was, as they say, […]

* “This is nuts!” – Ben & Jerry I have the weirdest tradition of listening to “Ocean,” from Sebadoh’s poppiest album Harmacy, around this time of year. But I finally get it, anyway: whereas for the longest time I felt ashamed for liking a song so full of malady rejection within this seasonal landscape of […]

I think I’m closing in on a discourse that would slot the second song on The Joshua Tree as the greatest song of all time. This tabulation would be based purely on the frequency of my exposure to it as of late, although Don McClean’s “American Pie” in the summer time and Don Henley’s “Boys […]

The deck just seemed to be stacked against Cincinnati’s Heartless Bastards from the start. First of all, their hometown, often dubbed “Nasty Natty,” [1] is hardly the worldwide hub of flagship musical manifestations [2]. For release of their albums, they ended up looking to Fat Possum, an independent label way down in the Deep South […]

The 1990s, with the popularization of the Internet and Starbucks coffee among other things, represented an economic boom that oversaw a five-fold increase in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. With this ballooning of production came a mirroring process in the music industry of myriad record labels positioned for fostering a wealth of music that represented […]

Once upon a time there was a town called LA. In the 1980s, this town was packed to the brim with weirdos — guys who would wear lipstick, groups of black dudes who would eat magic mushrooms and spearhead this new style called ska-punk, and, generally, a problematic, even inconceivable sense of freedom and expession. […]

For anyone unfamiliar with Jeff Passan, he’s the highly agreeable and enthusiastic on-field voice of ESPN’s baseball broadcasts, and frequent contributor to Sportscenter on any and all things baseball-related. As has been the default in these pandemic times with many of these figures, including one girl who hoists a copy of Wowee Zowee [1] on […]