476. Love Tractor, This Ain’t No Outer Space Ship (1986) The early nineteen-eighties was a good time for a band to ply their trade in Athens, Georgia. In addition to an especially fertile club scene, boosted by a college crowd … Continue reading College Countdown: CMJ Top 1000, 1979 – 1989 — #476 to #474
Hypnotic and steely, the new single from Ela Minus is a forceful techno anthem for our wounded times. Born in Bogota and based in Brooklyn, Minus makes music with an impeccable sense of craft, layering on airy, rich vocals that … Continue reading This Week’s Model — Ela Minus, “megapunk”
479. Roxy Music, Flesh + Blood (1980) After Roxy Music returned from an extended hiatus to make the 1979 album Manifesto, they found themselves making significant adjustments intended to insinuate their music into the marketplace. Songs from the album were … Continue reading College Countdown: CMJ Top 1000, 1979 – 1989 — #479 to #477
“I can’t believe the worst kinds of people achieve/ Everything they want/ But it takes medication to get me off.” In her new song, Lydia Loveless does a damn fine job of encapsulating what it’s like to live in the … Continue reading This Week’s Model — Lydia Loveless, “Love is Not Enough”
Well, the title is just about perfect, isn’t it? For their third full-length effort, Haim swing their broadswords straight at the identity shorthand that gets laid upon their music, defining their craft less by the sounds assembled and more by … Continue reading The New Releases Shelf — Women in Music Pt. III
482. Negativland, Escape from Noise (1987) Richard Lyons and Mike Hosler had been operating together as Negativland for nearly ten years when they and their collaborators delivered the album Escape from Noise. The group’s first outing for SST Records, a … Continue reading College Countdown: CMJ Top 1000, 1979 – 1989 — #482 to #480
“And soon I’ll the neon shining moon/ And I’ll break you up just like the stars/ I’ll be the Earth without disease/ And you the human inside of me,” Shamir sings at the opening of “I Wonder,” his new single. … Continue reading This Week’s Model — Shamir, “I Wonder”
485. Jerry Harrison: Casual Gods, Casual Gods (1988) Thanks to his membership in Talking Heads, Jerry Harrison could claim a central part in creating some of the best and most influential rock music of the nineteen-seventies and nineteen-eighties. As the … Continue reading College Countdown: CMJ Top 1000, 1979 – 1989 — #485 to #483
Years ago, I received a piece of advice that I assumed was worldly wise: Whatever other professionals you might work with in management of your day-to-day affairs, make sure you have a mechanic you can trust. I suppose there’s truth … Continue reading This Week’s Model — Bully, “Every Tradition”
If there’s a better pure songwriter than Phoebe Bridgers at this moment, I don’t know who it is. Punisher, Bridgers’s sophomore release under her own name, comes after some productive moonlighting with pals in the groups boygenius and Better Oblivion … Continue reading The New Releases Shelf — Punisher
Coffee for Two 