Blogs

Portugal. the Man – In The Mountain In The Cloud Portugal. the Man always releases albums that almost feel like a single giant song. Everything on the album has one overlaying tone that ties the whole thing together, which also seems the case even with their...

Vusi Mahlasela – Say Africa South African singer-songwriter Vusi Mahlasela achieved a certain level of global exposure when he became one of the featured musicians for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, an event which was (much to my delight) just as much an...

A$AP Rocky – LIVELOVEA$AP As 2011 comes to an end, 2012 should be ushered in with the clanking of wine bottles, half-witted New Year‰'s Resolutions and a long overdue moratorium on the word “swag.‰” If not for the word‰'s blatant overuse, the moratorium should...

Colin Stetson – New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges Think of everything you believe a saxophone to be capable of. Over the course of the 45-minute New History Warface Vol. 2: Judges, Bon Iver/Arcade Fire associate Colin Stetson burns those notions to the ground...

Real Estate – Days For a genre teeming with pale, skinny, upper-middle-class dudes, its surprising that an indie group didn’t deliver The Suburbs much earlier. But while Arcade Fire drenched its Grammy award-winning semi-autobiographical album in weirdly...

You know that time of year when you just stop caring? You visit your friends less because maybe it‰'s snowing and you have too much homework then all of a sudden your dog has the runs all while your mom is calling to tell you that bitch across the street has the same...

A new wave prince of the 2010s, George Lewis Jr. is the captivating lead singer and musical intellect behind current Brooklyn-based band Twin Shadow. Closing the last hour and a half of a Wednesday night with soft, sparkly melodies at the Santos Party House, Twin...

Chelsea Wolfe is truly something demonic. In her follow up to her 2010 debut The Grime and the Glow, ?????????? (pronounced ‘Apokalypsis’), Wolfe engages in a forlorn study of absolute darkness in all of its many aspects. The result is a gripping, deep,...

The Roots- Undun After seeing the Roots live this summer and watching them perform mischievously on Jimmy Fallon‰'s show, I‰'d expect their new album to be a big showy, brassy affair. Instead, it‰'s scaled down, condensed, distilled. At 39 minutes it‰'s their shortest...

As I near my final weeks in Florence, Italy, the cradle of the Renaissance, studying art conservation and art history, I pause to write for you, dear DJ, a playlist that conveys for your some sense of my experiences in a foreign land. Though I could go on and on about...

The role of the independent record label in the 21st century is to curate and to catalog music, even through the great multitude of pressures and distractions of society. Their mission is to represent a group of bands that set themselves apart and share an interest in...

King Krule- King Krule EP This EP is awfully hard to pin down, for many reasons. First of all, blatant Brit Archy “King Krule‰” Marshall is only 17, but he has the voice of a 40-year old. Perhaps I’m biased, but it seems like he‰'s got a lot more on his mind...

English indie punk rock trio Johnny Foreigner played Islington venue Relentless Garage earlier this month to a mixed crowd with demographics ranging from Warped Tour teenagers to normal twenty-somethings to a significantly older couple who I‰'m pretty sure weren‰'t...

Right now the most popular section of AU‰'s student newspaper is Eagle Rants, a daily opinion column where anybody can anonymously post their thoughts on anything. On November 16, in between notes about being lonely in the dorms and arguments that communications...

When Ornette Coleman‰'s now classic The Shape of Jazz to Come was released on May 22nd, 1959, no one was quite sure how to react. At the time, bebop was the dominant form of jazz, reaching its second wave of popularity, and Miles Davis‰' Kind of Blue was to be...

Sometimes saying the word slut just feels so good. But, I used to try to stray away from this word because feminism is no longer solely focused on male-female relationships, but rather female-female relationships. We live in a world where girls are forced to be in...

Jet lag wasn‰'t an issue for Givers. The sunny indie-pop quintet made the journey from Lafayette, La. to London last week, playing Shoreditch hotspot XOYO with all the energy of kids just let out on the last day of school. The night opened with the underwhelming coed...

I turned 20 this summer and as I‰'ve mourned the loss of my teenage years, I‰'ve also been reminiscing about the music that defined them. I can name exactly what I was listening to during every stage of my life. Every graduation, birthday, heartbreak, fight, and...

There are not many bands whose live act could not benefit from a spectacular setting. Surely even the bowel-loosening, Juno-award-winning strains of Nickelback could become magical and intoxicating if you saw them in the right place (inside a burning freight car, in a...

Thee Oh Sees ‰ÛÒ Carrion Crawler/The Dream A combination of two separate EP‰'s, this latest release from John Dwyer‰'s Thee Oh Sees is a relentless, no-frills collection of garage rock stompers, as opposed to the psych-pop tunes showcased on their earlier 2011 album...

CMJ‰'s schedule is full of tiny bands playing half a dozen shows each in an effort to get noticed by college radio stations and blogs and to interface with promotional companies. However cool these bands may try to appear (and I watched two separate bass players try...