Because I, too, am sometimes ready to rage. Gnosis, the eighth album from Chicago trio Russian Circles, is scheduled for release in August. Continue reading This Week’s Model — Russian Circles, “Conduit”

For music fans with a long enough memory, I think there’s probably no way for the new Laura Veris single, “Eucalyptus,” to avoid comparisons to Suzanne Vega. A lilting female voice engaged in plain, crisp storytelling using a staccato rhythm … Continue reading This Week’s Model — Laura Veirs, “Eucalyptus”

“Nothing (In My Head),” the new track from the Baltimore band Pinkshift, is a bazooka. In press material accompanying the release, the band explains that the song is about feeling trapping and longing for escape. The annotation is hardly necessary, … Continue reading This Week’s Model — Pinkshift, “Nothing (In My Head)”

I don’t know I can be expected to resist this. Suede’s new single, “She Still Leads Me,” moves with a swoop and dramatic grandeur that evokes the nineteen-nineties heyday of Britpop overstaters, such as Pulp, Oasis, and, um, themselves, I … Continue reading This Week’s Model — Suede, “She Still Leads Me”

I guess it’s official: I’m destined to immediately fall — and fall hard — for new tracks that merge a nineteen-nineties guitar fuzziness with early twenty-first century indie-rock yearning. Waxahatchee is undoubtedly the standard bearer for the sound, but Try … Continue reading This Week’s Model — Try the Pie, “Last of You”

The opening plinking tones, the gently kneaded sample of Hugh Masekela’s version of the R&B song “Stop,” the easygoing urgency of Black Thought’s rapping: there’s so much about “No Gold Teeth” that commands attention. Presented as an introduction to a … Continue reading This Week’s Model — Black Thought and Danger Mouse, “No Gold Teeth”

This is exactly the sort of breezy melancholy I’m looking for in my summer jams. Set against a shuffling indie-rock rhythm and lithe synth and guitars, the track expresses that sense of stasis that twentysomething scufflers have been humming about … Continue reading This Week’s Model — Sunflower Bean, “In Flight”

Yeah, that’s the stuff. We, the new album from Arcade Fire, is scheduled for release in May. Continue reading This Week’s Model — Arcade Fire, “Unconditional I (Lookout Kid)”

I come by the selections for this weekly feature in a variety of ways, but I think this is the first time the cut in question first found my earholes because it was lobbed into my social media feeds by … Continue reading This Week’s Model — Linqua Franqa, “Oh Fxck”

Anna Calvi does not underachieve. After being hired to compose the score for late-series episodes of Peaky Blinders, Calvi just kept going, writing some songs inspired by the show’s main character, Tommy Shelby (played by Cillian Murphy). “Ain’t No Grave” … Continue reading This Week’s Model — Anna Calvi, “Ain’t No Grave”