God bless Deerhoof for never growing tired of being Deerhoof. In the time it takes most two-decade-old bands to make a record, Deerhoof makes three. Shattered kick drums litter the San Francisco band’s trajectory. Deerhoof makes music recklessly and wildly, but with great skill and a premium on sweetness.
Every Friday, dozens of new records are released into the wild. Some make big splashes, and others sink almost immediately. For most music consumers, it’s almost too much information, and save for those precious few who spend their hours glued to reviews sites and release calendars, it’s hard to know what’s coming out…
The best promo for PJ Harvey’s ninth studio album, The Hope Six Demolition Project, came about entirely by accident. An unsuspecting Washington Post reporter published an account of the day he took a mysterious, dark-haired “musician/poet” on a tour of Washington, D.C.’s underdeveloped neighborhoods. That passenger…
Welcome back to AVQ&A, where we throw out a question for discussion among the staff and readers. Consider this a prompt to compare notes on your interface with pop culture, to reveal your embarrassing tastes and experiences, and to ponder how our diverse lives all led us to convene here together. Got a question you’d…
Our list of the 15 best albums of 2015 wasn’t just a one-man decision. It’s a committee call. Each regular music writer and A.V. Club staff member gets a chance to list their top 10 records, with their No. 1 record getting 10 points, their No. 2 getting nine, and so on. From there, we do a little math, and the list is…
Stuff Like That There roughly simulates the second encore of a marathon Yo La Tengo show, when the casual fans and out-past-their-bedtime parents have gone home and the band indulges in affectionate covers and acoustic rarities. There’s a late-night looseness to the project that’s appealing, if not necessarily…
For most artists, the concept album is the one half your career has led up to. For Neil Young, it’s the thing he throws together in a few raucous-seeming weeks every three or four years.
Don’t call it a comeback: Modest Mouse will be the first to tell you that it never really went away in the first place. The group just stopped making records for a while, taking on the right mix of touring, soundtrack work, and home-studio construction to stave off an official hiatus.
In We’re No. 1, The A.V. Club examines a song that went to No. 1 on the Billboard charts to get to the heart of what it means to be popular in pop music, and how that has changed over the years. In this installment, we cover Aerosmith’s Nine Lives, which went to No. 1 on the Billboard 200 around its release in March…
A month before releasing his new and first commercially available solo album, Himanshu Suri (Heems) tweeted his frustrations with the promotion process. “I made an album at the end of 2013 in one of the darkest periods of my life,” the former Das Racist rapper wrote, “and now I have to relive it through interviews for…
As an unexpected excursion into vocoder-enhanced electronica from a folk-rock star, Neil Young’s Trans is confusing. Mashed together with a few songs from a tropical-themed project recorded months prior in Hawaii, though, it becomes absolutely confounding: The two distinct projects have no business appearing on the…
Its title and somewhat puzzling distribution method point obsessively toward the future, but neither’s enough to fool the discerning fan: Thom Yorke’s Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes is a throwback to nearly a decade prior. Remember the summer of 2006? Radiohead found itself in the midst of a lengthy dry recording spell, then…
“I always liked it slow / Slow is in my blood,” a rasping Leonard Cohen claims at the start of his 13th album, Popular Problems. That’s true—one number, “Born In Chains,” took a reported 40 years’ worth of revisions to get right—though in fact the Canadian songwriter is speeding up in his 80th year. Popular Problems…
