Merging orchestral music with modern pop stylings often results in a sonic mess, tilting toward either the pure cheese of the disco classical that burbled up in the nineteen-seventies and -righties or the unbearable pretension of rock acts trying to expand their … Continue reading This Week’s Model — Anna Meredith, “Paramour”
692. Go-Betweens, Tallulah (1987) Tallulah might not have delivered the Go-Betweens their first experience with professional disappointment, nor even their most pronounced. And yet the recording experience and subsequent related duties were peppered with enough frustrations that the album stands … Continue reading College Countdown: CMJ Top 1000, 1979 – 1989 — #692 to #689
Long Beard is the performing moniker employed by singer-songwriter Leslie Bear, whose 2015 debut album, Sleepwalker, stirred up admiring interest from music fans inclined towards the wistful. Recently relocated from Canada to her native New Jersey, bear acknowledges her songwriting … Continue reading This Week’s Model — Long Beard, “Sweetheart”
696. Dan Fogelberg, The Innocent Age (1981) There was a point when music artists of a certain stature couldn’t simply release a new record. An extra level of import was required, and so singer-songwriter Dan Fogelberg followed his greatest commercial … Continue reading College Countdown: CMJ Top 1000, 1979 – 1989 — #696 to #693
Back when Fridays were turned over older songs excavated from my digital collection, the edition that landed around the U.S. federal holiday Independence Day often featured a track that somehow, some way spoke to the character of the nation celebrating … Continue reading This Week’s Model — Lucy Dacus, “Forever Half Mast”
Three months shy of his seventieth birthday, no one would chastise Bruce Springsteen for hanging up his guitar strap. Especially following the monumental Springsteen on Broadway run, it would seem the man who strummed his first formative chords with the … Continue reading The New Releases Shelf — Western Stars
Whatever other plentiful complaints can be lodged against the hair metal band Winger, they deserve admiring credit for the novelistic perfection of this detail: Their final single to place on the Billboard Hot 100 bears the title “Easy Come Easy … Continue reading Top 40 Smash Near Misses — “Easy Come Easy Go”
700. Dinosaur Jr., You’re Living All Over Me (1987) Still known as simply Dinosaur at the time, the band fronted by J. Mascis released their sophomore full-length, You’re Living All Over Me, late in 1987. Championed by members of Sonic … Continue reading College Countdown: CMJ Top 1000, 1979 – 1989 — #700 to #697
Banned: The song deemed ‘too dangerous’ for the BBC by Stephen Dowling In a marvelous act of research and wry summary, Stephen Dowling provides the details on around a dozen different songs that have received official bans from the BBC … Continue reading Outside Reading — When She Squeezed Me Tight She Nearly Broke My Spine edition
I want music to be complex and surprising. I want intricacies and subversions, devilishly clever reinvention and bursts of inspiration that upend the very foundations of pop. But sometimes — often, really — what I want more than anything is … Continue reading This Week’s Model — Sheer Mag, “Blood From a Stone”
Coffee for Two 