2022 was another interesting and relatively lucrative year for music. Not much of particular note happening in the way of rock’s oldest active veterans (i.e. those who began in the ’60s or ’70s), but a few major ’90s and 2000s came back to show that they’re still determined to move forward artistically. One 2010s starter… Read more
Photo Credit: Roberto Ricciuti/Redferns Following up on an album like Sometimes I Might Be Introvert is an unenviable task by anyone’s standard. Little Simz Mercury Prize-winning fourth album was an orchestral, genre-mashing masterpiece filled with expert story-telling – upon release, it was widely compared to the likes of Lauryn Hill’s Miseducation and Kendrick Lamar’s To… Read more
With the world largely returning to normal this year, 2022 saw no shortage of musical releases – with big hitters like Beyoncé, Drake, and Kendrick Lamar returning (to varying levels of success) and a new generation of talent (like Ethel Cain and London’s Black Country, New Road) making themselves heard. Below I sift through the… Read more
Photo Credit: Mary Ellen Matthews The run-up to SZA’s sophomore effort SOS has been long, unpredictable, and reliably confounding. Its lead single – and SZA’s first solo top-ten hit – “Good Days” arrived almost two years before the rest of the album and wouldn’t enjoy an official music video until March 2021, by which time… Read more
Constantly changing throughout the year, my Album of the Year list – which I always enjoy making – this year constitutes Irish Weird Al Yankovic-inspired country pop, moist body parts, teenage Sonic Youth apprentices, weaponized troglodytes, crashing metaphoric airplanes, strong, colorful, Canadian beverages, and for the first time since 2018 – no hip-hop albums. Below… Read more
Photo Credit: Richard Beland Since their debut in 1996, or at least certainly since their multi-platinum 2001 breakthrough Silver Side Up, Nickelback has generally been perceived as an unfortunate by-product of the early ’90s Seattle grunge sound. However, on their tenth album Get Rollin’, Nickelback seems to have more common with the dominating rock genre… Read more
2022 saw no shortage of fantastic music, which is perhaps why there’s so much disagreement as to what the year’s big, standout releases were. With this list, I attempt to break through the noise and put aside any personal biases to objectively assess the most important releases from this year. #10. Alvvays – ‘Blue Rev’… Read more
I’m always finding it harder to put together a “best songs of the year” list than a “best albums of the year” list because whenever I listen to music, I prefer to consume the entire album rather than pick out specific songs. Yeah, there really are people like me out there! Nonetheless, here are ten… Read more
Photo Credit: Aaron Rapoport/Corbis/Getty Christine McVie, the longtime keyboardist, and vocalist for Fleetwood Mac died on November 30th at age seventy-nine. The first of her three non-consecutive tenures with the band lasted for a quarter-century beginning in 1970, which made her the first woman to join, and a few years later an integral part of… Read more
Photo Credit: Johannes Lovund EDM, perhaps more than any other genre, defined the commercial music of the 2010s. When you think about the biggest, most inescapable hits of the decade, you realize a majority of them belong to this genre – the late Avicii’s “Wake Me Up,” Major Lazer, DJ Snake, and MØ’s “Lean On”… Read more