Aldous Harding makes catchy songs that don’t initially seem like catchy songs. Her music is not difficult in the sense of being harsh or overloaded. A lot of it is pretty. Some of it is funny. Plenty of it gets stuck in your head, although usually after sneaking in through a side door and pretending…
Now we’ve heard the experimental hip-hop gateway records. So what next? The lazy answer would be to get weirder, but I don’t think that’s quite right. Weirdness alone gets old fast. Anybody can make a beat sound broken. Anybody can rap over static. Anybody can throw a few ugly samples together and call it experimental….
Even if you’ve never listened to a Bilal album, there’s a very good chance you’ve heard Bilal. He’s one of those artists who keeps showing up on other people’s records and instantly enhancing everything. Kendrick Lamar, Common, Jay-Z, Mac Miller, Robert Glasper, The Roots, a long list of people with excellent taste and working ears….
Ranking Tears for Fears feels simple for about five seconds. You put Songs from the Big Chair at number one, The Hurting at number two, and everyone nods with the satisfied air of people who have not yet made the conversation interesting. Someone hums “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.” Someone else says something about…
The Clash had a classic run that was short enough that, if you play it straight through, it almost feels both improbable and necessary that a band this alive burned through itself so quickly. The real problem is that The Clash have at least three endings, and which one you believe in says a lot…
Mac Miller’s catalog is very easy to try to make a nice, tidy narrative out of. You know the version. The goofy Pittsburgh kid makes bright internet-era mixtapes about weed, girls, skipping class, and being young enough to think momentum might last forever. Then the backlash comes. Then the music darkens and he becomes the…
1983 is the year pop music starts acting like the camera is already in the room. You can hear it almost immediately. The drums hit harder and the synths get shinier. Hooks arrive cleaner, more repeatable. Hair, makeup, dance moves, lighting, jackets, poses, video concepts, all of it stops feeling extra. It becomes part of…
Nina Simone did not leave behind one road, she left escape routes. That is why her influence is so hard to map. Some artists create a sound that later musicians follow. But where do you put someone who was trained as a classical pianist, worked in jazz clubs, sang blues and folk songs, turned standards…
Sturgill Simpson has never seemed especially interested in making things easy for anyone. Not for Nashville or country radio. Not for fans who wanted him to keep making the same record. Not even for people who wanted a clean narrative about what kind of artist he was supposed to be. That is part of what…
So maybe you’ve never heard of post-punk or don’t really know exactly what it is. Great. This is going to be fun. Because post-punk is one of those genres that sounds like a door getting kicked open and then, instead of everyone running through in one loud straight line, a bunch of weird, smart, restless…