Photo Credit: Eleanor Petry Taking its title from a popular alcoholic beverage of her youth, Molly Rankin and her band members reach new heights on their delayed third album. “’cause we’re always…,” Molly Rankin assures halfway through a sentence on the second track of Alvvays’ new record, almost as if she felt a reminder could… Read more
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
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
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
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
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: RCA Records Gashi is the sort of musician you can’t help but root for. He has a deeply inspiring backstory; having turned to rap music for a salve as a refugee child struggling to adapt to the English language and life in New York. Moreover, his vision of rap music is a deeply… Read more
Photo Credit: Michael Bezjian The indelible public image of Aaron Carter, who died on Saturday, November 5th at age 34, will be that of the smiling child with bleach-blonde hair standing either next to his brother Nick (of Backstreet Boys fame) or next to Hilary Duff or Lindsay Lohan (his relationships with them as a… Read more
Photo Credit: Beth Garrabrant (All Photos) Taylor Swift’s re-recordings have, so far, been largely successful – beyond achieving their central aim of giving Swift back control of the masters of her first six albums, they’ve earned her another No.1 with “All Too Well,” as well as jumpstarting an overdue critical re-evaluation of her earliest works…. Read more
Photo Credit: Samuel Bradley In 2020, The 1975 attempted to take their music to new heights with an expansive, experimental double LP. Whereas many of their peers – from Taylor Swift to Fiona Apple – gained acclaim for branching off in new directions that year, The 1975’s Notes On A Conditional Form proved divisive; one… Read more