Two kids in their early twenties walk down the Bowery on a spring afternoon, just as the proprietor of a club hangs an awning with the new name for his venue.
In the spring of 1969, the inauspicious release of Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band's Trout Mask Replica, a double-album featuring 28 stream-of-consciousness songs filled with abstract rhythms and guttural bellows, dramatically altered the pop landscape.
When the Motor City 5 stormed the stage, the band combined the kinetic flash of James Brown on acid with the raw musical dynamics of the Who gone berserk.
From a Los Angeles hospital bed, equipped with little more than a laptop and a stack of records, James "e;J Dilla"e; Yancey crafted a set of tracks that would forever change the way beatmakers viewed their artform.
Ween now seems like a permanent fixture on the pop-cultural landscape, but when the band first hit MTV in the early '90s, their longevity wasn't so secure.
"e;Music From Big Pink is a moving book that succeeds not just in vividly evoking its time and place but in distilling one young man's cliched and minor destiny into something approaching tragedy.
Although Exile in Guyville was celebrated as one of the year's top records by Spin and the New York Times, it was also, to some, an abomination: a mockery of the Rolling Stones' most revered record and a rare glimpse into the psyche of a shrewd, independent, strong young woman.
Accustomed to being centre stage, international award-winning singer Ian Bostridge, like so many performers, spent much of 2020 and 2021 unable to take part in live music.
In 1978, San Francisco, a city that has seen more than its share of trauma, plunged from a summer of political tension into an autumn cascade of malevolence that so eluded human comprehension it seemed almost demonic.
To wander the streets of a bankrupt, often lawless, New York City in the early 1970s wearing a T-shirt with PLEASE KILL ME written on it was an act of determined nihilism, and one often recounted in the first reports of Richard Hell filtering into the pre-punk UK.
In the fall of 1980 Richard and Linda Thompson (of Fairport Convention fame) had recently been dumped from their record label and were on the verge of divorce.
What resonated about Endtroducing when it was released in 1996, and what makes it still resonate today, is the way in which it loosens itself from the mooring of the known and sails off into an uncharted territory that seems to exist both in and out of time.
In the spring of 1969, the inauspicious release of Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band's Trout Mask Replica, a double-album featuring 28 stream-of-consciousness songs filled with abstract rhythms and guttural bellows, dramatically altered the pop landscape.
Of all the seminal albums to come out in 1991-the year of Nevermind, Loveless, Ten, and Out of Time, among others-none were quieter, both in volume and influence, than Spiderland, and no band more mysterious than Slint.
To wander the streets of a bankrupt, often lawless, New York City in the early 1970s wearing a T-shirt with PLEASE KILL ME written on it was an act of determined nihilism, and one often recounted in the first reports of Richard Hell filtering into the pre-punk UK.
Snapshots of how English pop culture’s rebels and outsiders, from The Long Blondes and The Libertines, to Tricky and Goldfrapp, altered our sense of a green but sometimes unpleasant land.
Released when ELP and Elton John were plodding from one packed stadium to the next, Radio City was a radical album influenced by records that were already deemed oldies and yet sounding like a lean electrical jolt from the future.
Based on his critically-acclaimed BBC Radio 3 programme The Listening Service, in which Tom Service takes an idea on an ear-opening and mind-expanding walk through the musical landscape every week, this book is a celebration of music's multi-dimensional power in our lives.
Non-fans regard Celine Dion as ersatz and plastic, yet to those who love her, no one could be more real, with her impoverished childhood, her (creepy) manager-husband's struggle with cancer, her knack for howling out raw emotion.
Words like "e;inspiring,"e; "e;expansive,"e; and "e;moving"e; are regularly used to describe Sigur Ros's ( ), and yet the only words heard on the record itself are a handful of meaningless nonsense syllables.
The serene, delicate songs on Another Green World sound practically meditative, but the album itself was an experiment fueled by adrenaline, panic, and pure faith.
The serene, delicate songs on Another Green World sound practically meditative, but the album itself was an experiment fueled by adrenaline, panic, and pure faith.
In 1978, San Francisco, a city that has seen more than its share of trauma, plunged from a summer of political tension into an autumn cascade of malevolence that so eluded human comprehension it seemed almost demonic.
Two kids in their early twenties walk down the Bowery on a spring afternoon, just as the proprietor of a club hangs an awning with the new name for his venue.
