It’s been twenty-six years since Alanis Morissette released Jagged Little Pill. The album was a sensation, launching her to pop superstardom. The relative suddenness of her transition from obscurity to omnipresence combined with her youth made it see like a … Continue reading This Week’s Model — Deep Sea Diver, “Hand in My Pocket”
Hailing from Portland (the Maine one, not the Oregon one), Weakened Friends hit that fuzzy-end-of-the-lollipop sweet spot with their new single, “Quitter.” It’s got all the elements that time served in my particular era — or eras, really — of … Continue reading This Week’s Model — Weakened Friends, “Quitter”
Adia Victoria maintains that her new album, A Southern Gothic, is an act of reclamation. She takes back all that belongs to her and her kindred, in race, in culture, in gender, in every part of her identity that has … Continue reading This Week’s Model — Adia Victoria, “You Was Born To Die”
I often hear the famous Toni Morrison quote “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it” modified to speak to the particular need to fill gaps in the … Continue reading This Week’s Model — MUNA, “Silk Chiffon (feat. Phoebe Bridgers)”
For those who are driven into recurring bouts of disappointment and misery because onetime titan of melancholy pop Morrissey now devotes his energy to finding novel ways to demonstrate he’s a wanker, I would like to remind you that Johnny … Continue reading This Week’s Model — Johnny Marr, “Spirit, Power and Soul”
If the likes of Haim can create elegant throwbacks to nineteen-seventies pop that somehow sound modern and fresh, then surely there’s a vast tract of fertile ground in reviving and reinventing the R&B groove of the same area. That’s what … Continue reading This Week’s Model — Amber Mark, “Foreign Things”
As previously shared, I had the pleasure and honor of being on the air at my alma mater college radio station last week. In part because I limited myself to music released between fall 1988 and spring 1993, and in … Continue reading This Week’s Model — Church Girls, “Separated”
I don’t know if it’s entirely fair that a bad this prolific is also this good. Continue reading This Week’s Model — Big Thief, “Little Things”
On the song “Superhero,” Ani Difranco writes about the experience of falling in love despite her determination to avoid such entanglements. Among its lyrics is a couplet that captures the way the world seems to transform around anyone who’s so … Continue reading This Week’s Model — Chubby and the Gang, “I Hate the Radio”
The quality of the new cut from Sleigh Bells that I admire most is the way it take the tried-and-true tricks the band has been plying since the jump and gives them a winning spruce-up. On “Locust Laced,” the jackhammer-burst … Continue reading This Week’s Model — Sleigh Bells, “Locust Laced”
