Score: 7/10 . So the Pixies are, like, a THING, in the 2010’s, apparently: Beneath the Eyrie marks their third album in the last five years and change, lo and behold. It’s actually got a Pixies feel, too… well for folk’s sake what the he** is a Pixies FEEL? In their heyday their music ranged […]

Score: 7.5/10 . Korn is a band from the rather remote Central Californian town of Bakersfield that formed in ’93, is now on their 13th album (released on Friday the 13th, of all days) and amazingly, in 26 years of existence, has had only one lineup change, the 2011 enlisting of still-active drummer Ray Luzier […]

Score: 4/10 . About four minutes into the first track of my first listen to this new TOOL album, Adam Jones’ electric guitar started to gather some steam, putting together a thick riff that seemed not so much plastered onto the rest of the band’s groove but funneled up into it like some aquiline tsunami […]

Score: 10/10 . Just to overview what exactly this is, Live and Loud encompasses two CD’s which once resided on the In Utero / Deluxe Edition issued in 2013 and still do, but now enjoy their own pressing to vinyl, apart from In Utero, as well as their own separate streaming interface. As a Nirvana […]

Score: 7/10 . Right away to Missy’s credit on this new five-track EP, which marks her first collection of new material in 14 years (although the apt will remember that “Where They from” track from ’15), the title seems to speak back to hip-hop greats — all the guy legends as well as allusions to […]

Score: 10/10 . Really, in all honesty, at some point in this murky quagmire, I’m planning on getting to the topic of music. But first I’d like to discuss white middle America. It’s the place that developed Viagra. It’s the place that started genetically modifying tomatoes and mass-producing coffee in Colombia, putting that country’s economy […]

Score: 8.5/10 . The most powerful woman in techno you’ve never heard of, Ellen Allien, owning to an astonishing 11 studio albums and two record labels to her name (BPitch and UFO Inc.), chimes in here with another focused, eclectic array of complex but captivating IDM music. The songs are sonically interesting and otherworldly but […]

Score: 6/10 . Well, pride always comes before the fall, as they say, and it’s usually when we think we can do no wrong that our resting-on-laurels disposition starts to stink of the worst hubris and everything falls flat. The Gus is a collection of pointless folk rock songs that hark back to a time […]

Score: 9/10 . It’s “Flat Tummy Tea,” the lead single off of seventh Freddie Gibbs album and second Madlib collabo Bandana. The Gary rapper is spitting the bars-packed chorus with the lines “Crackers came to Africa rappin’ to raffle rummage me / America was the name of their fu**in’ company”. Elsewhere, we get the off-the-cuff […]

Score: 7.5/10 . In Cameron Crowe’s ’70s rock biopic Almost Famous, the rock god pecking order takes a distinct turn: the lead guitarist is actually seen as the megastar of the group, which in this case is the fictitious act of Stillwater [1], the lead singer and the rest of the band then sort of […]