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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...

Opening for Switch & Scottie B this Saturday at U Street Music Hall, D.C. Drum & Bass DJ Harry Ransom is undoubtedly one of the upcoming creative minds of Drum & Bass in the D.C. area. A man with a tinkering intuition for developing production techniques,...

Writing about Cloud Cult is hard. Listening to Cloud Cult is easy – with mellow percussion and violin melodies, the music feels like something your ears don‰'t just want but desperately need to hear. But thinking too long or too deeply about Cloud Cult is simply...

Without getting all Almost Famousy, what I love about music is that it celebrates what is real and messy and honest. School and society are often preoccupied with perfection and having it all together (it‰'s stressful, man!) but CMJ and more specifically, Atlas Sound...

Merge Records – “The indie label that got big and stayed small.‰” While many indie record labels strive for the “we‰'re doing our best‰” mentality (Fat Possum comes to mind), Merge seeks perfection. But does their quest for Billboard ranks and Grammys stray away...