With Snail Mail’s Lush, indie rock has officially entered its “Black Crowes era,” where young artists refigure music from the decade they were born. But that’s not a bad thing here. As the brainchild of 18-year-old Lindsey Jordan, who counts Helium’s Mary Timony and Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield as mentors, Snail …
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When the Who started out, they billed themselves as “maximum R&B.” And before Pete Townshend embraced teenage wasteland and became one of rock’s poet laureates, the group was content playing blues and soul covers. Check out their stirring version of James Brown’s “I Don’t Mind” on My Generation, their myriad …
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Clichés are clichés for a reason, goes the cliché – as Brent Cobb demonstrates in the title track to his latest LP, a tribute to throwing a cooler in your ride and heading down to a sacred spot to chill. That’s the upshot of countless ham-handed country-radio anthems. But here, …
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There’s no sidestepping that rock’n’roll – music predicated on self-centered celebrations of personal freedom – looks a little suspect these days in the hands of cisgender white guys, however “woke” they may be. And frankly that’s fitting, given the music’s shameful history of compensating black artists unfairly and an embedded …
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Jimi played guitar, jamming good with Billy and Buddy and the Experience – no, wait, that was Ziggy. But Hendrix was almost certainly a model for Bowie’s space crawler, an electric deity who sacrificed himself as he took it all too far. His music was haunted by death from the …
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Another politically motivated Rust Belt blond, Paul Newman, once said “a man with no enemies is a man with no character.” And few musicians could boast more of either than Eminem, the poison-tongued, potty-mouthed scourge of Lynn Cheney, boy bands, clown posses and eventually – on a string of self-auditing …
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A 24-year-old who grew up a Britney fan and now swears allegiance to Shania, Ballerini filled her 2015 debut with smack downs of Peter Pan bros and other losers, liars and users – songs that were country by virtue of the banjos and fiddles decorating their stomping choruses. When she …
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Jack Johnson is a retired competitive surfer living with his college sweetheart in Hawaii, but dude wants you to know he still stresses. “I don’t care for your paranoid us-against-them walls,” he purrs over gentle calypso-rocksteady grooves on “My Mind Is for Sale”; “Fragments” is a wistful ballad for our …
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