Score: 9/10 The great rapper Noah23 once said, “Sometimes… you’ve GOT to let go”. You might say, then, if you were like neurotic about allotting specific, designated objectives to all the bands you listen to (which I imagine some John Cusack-akin individuals in the 1990s might have been), that Khruangbin (which I finally figured out […]

Score: 10/10 Once upon a time this band from LA became the best band on the planet. It happened overnight. They got the right manager. They were on just the right label, which got them mainstream promotion, radio play and even an unlimited music video budget. They belted out Aerosmith-akin guitar riffs over groove-funk rhythmics. […]

Score: 7.5/10 In April 2016, after the tragic news came in of Prince’s passing, I shared simply the word “Delirious” on Facebook, hoping everyone knew what I meant, which some did. About four days to a week later, I got my next issue of The New Yorker in the mail, which had a purple cover […]

Score: 9/10 One side of me gets so up in arms when I see Wire described as “art punk” on Wikipedia. After all, punk rock, at its mid-’70s onset (into which Wire themselves fed a key tinge of reckless abandon), was the anti-art — the dumb, loud and glorious reaction to the contrived, style-over-substance world […]

Score: 8.5/10 Elephant Stone is a lo-fi troupe out of Montreal, a Canadian city six hours north of the Big Apple by car and planted pretty much squatly on its line of longitude. Now, this might seem like a random bit of meaningless trivia, but interestingly, listening to their distinctly concise and gorgeously textural new […]

Score: 9/10 I can’t remember how but somehow probably four or five years ago (it might have been from reading the L.A. Record, likely the raddest online music journal out there) I got to following this Burger Records imprint out of Orange County, which always, whether or not I actually like the music, seems to […]

Score: 9.5/10 Like I imagine is the case with a lot of people, my introduction to Lucinda Williams was the critical and commercial 1998 breakthrough that was Car Wheels on a Gravel Road. New offering from this year Good Souls Better Angels travels along similar lines of country-rock hodgepodge but, I think, is more victoriously […]

Score: 9.5/10 Track three of Zeroh’s new album, “Metacine,” opens with a half-muffled spoken-word sound bite over ambient jazz: “Europeans have no woman god in their mythology / But we do / So what of the African mind in the West?” The track (I hesitate to call any of these events “songs,” much less “jams” […]

Score: 2.5/10 Pearl Jam happens to be a band I generally really like, having even I think blasted out a refreshing eruption of straight-ahead raw energy on 2013’s Lightning Bolt, so I’m going to be as brief, or as SIDELONG, as it were, as I possibly can here. But unfortunately there’s no avoiding the fact […]

Score: 10/10 Now, if I were gonna sit here and tell you the new Cornershop record is GOOD, that it’s not gimmicky, that it draws from a cross-section of Britpop from The Verve back to the post-punk of mid-era XTC, you’d probably have my head, and rightly so, perhaps. The malady is probably confounded by […]