Late Night Jamz is an ongoing feature dedicated to newly discovered tracks that are sure to get stuck in your head. Uncovered in the wee hours of the evening just before bed after a long day of work or play, these are the gems that make the adventures in finding music so enjoyable. Tonight’s track … [Read more…]
The A.V. Club featured a very interesting surprise on their site today: News of a new MC Paul Barman album. According to an email he sent me, he’s sired two sons, appeared in friend and collaborator Michel Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind and recorded a new album called Thought Balloon Mushroom Cloud, which will be released on November … [Read more…]
Overlooked in the Aughts is an ongoing feature focusing on some of the best albums from the 2000s that haven’t quite received the attention they deserved. Today’s post: Aereogramme’s A Story In White. Metal. It’s one word that can just about demolish any band’s chances of gaining the kind of audience they might deserve. Of gaining … [Read more…]
There’s something so familiar about Wale’s “TV in the Radio” that it didn’t strike me until just now, late in the evening when I should be fast asleep. Yes, the song is catchy as all else, but seems so grounded in a historical sense of hip-hop. Something fresh, yet something experienced. It hit me after … [Read more…]
I mentioned Wale as a saving grace in hip-hop when I critiqued the “death” of hip-hop. Well, tomorrow the D.C.-Metro area rapper will drop his official debut album, Attention Deficit. So, what’s the word on the album? The New York Times‘s Jon Pareles gave the album a pretty good once over, but closed out with … [Read more…]
How things work seems to be a consistent obsession for people; it’s one of the many strains of curiosity that folks can’t seem to shake as they age. There’s something so fascinating about the complexity of the gears in a grandfather clock or how cops solve crimes from the tiniest details. (The later would explain … [Read more…]
A lot has been said about the musicians who have joined The National Campaign to Close Guantanamo, but none of them are quite as deliriously out-of-touch-and-context with what Keep America Safe‘s director Debra Burlingame told The Washington Times [via TwentyFourBit]: “It’s almost laughable to think that heavy metal bands like Nine Inch Nails and Rage … [Read more…]
Quitting is an action most won’t peg on Matt Groening. After all, The Simpsons has been going strong for a couple of decades with no sign of slowing down. Yet, at a panel on alternative comics for the Chicago Humanities Festival, Groening revealed he may quit making his weekly comic strip “Life is Hell.” The … [Read more…]
So, by now the “news” that Sufjan Stevens has declared his 50 states/50 albums project long gone has made its waves. In case you didn’t pick that up, here’s the excerpt from his interview with Paste: “The whole premise was such a joke,†he says now, “and I think maybe I took it too seriously. … [Read more…]
The Daily Swarm tossed a quick story about a “Mobler,” aka a Lloyd Dobler-themed flash mob that went down in NYC on Tuesday. Apparently Twentieth Century Fox put together a little gimmick to point people in the direction of the 20th Anniversary re-release of Cameron Crowe’s 80s teen rom-com Say Anything…. Mobler members dressed like … [Read more…]