Spring is right around the corner and that means summer’s even closer. That means the season of the Anthem. This little ditty by PLOY is bound to make any summer night the best ever. X I X by PLOY (Co-Produced by Charles B.) No joke this is one of the catchiest songs I’ve ever heard. [...]
There’s a concentrated wealth of indie music being exported from Scandinavia. Have you noticed? The countries of Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Iceland and Finland are heavy with nuanced melodies that have a tendency to sweep the listener into a tidal wave of memories and epiphanies. You can hear this “Scandinavian sound” in the music and showmanship [...]
Katy Perry – Teenage Dream “No matter how inevitable a song like “California Gurls” sounds, there are no guarantees, even at the highest levels of pop stardom [see Christina Aguilera's career-jeopardizing 2010 super bomb, Bionic.] For Madonna or even Britney, changing your look or sound every album cycle was enough. No more. Largely thanks to [...]
M.I.A. image via: Chicago Reader. ROGER KISBY/GETTY IMAGES It’s unfortunate, that in a world of major economic problems, wars being fought on many fronts, oil drilling companies wrecking the Gulf Of Mexico’s ecosystem, pop music’s only agit-pop totem is a woman who is conflicted on many counts. A woman who attempts to reflect the current [...]
Why is it that electronic pop seems to work so brilliantly for groups with limited membership? There are fine exceptions to this idea, but generally, the best work tends to come from folks working solo or adhering to the now-classic set up: one person handles all the loops, blurts and atmospherics, the other person takes [...]
Pic: Matt Sayles/AP I ran a fanzine for a while back in the day; even named a solo album after it – The Clutter of Pop The fanzine had a simple premise – in the period that I wrote it, the early 90′s, pop music appeared to have lost its way and to me everything [...]
I’m always interested in what Sasha Frere-Jones has to say about music, especially hip hop, as he has a great knack at being clear and concise in his overviews. I recently read his take on Lil Wayne’s single A Milli. That’s the link to the whole piece but here’s the relevant clip – “Lil Wayne’s [...]
I had a lot of fun last night playing with Boy Eats Drum Machine at the Wonder Ballroom, my first bass outing in a while. Dat’r, The Xploding Boys and Caves were the other bands on the bill reinterpreting classic songs from The Cure and Talking Heads. Dat’r re-imagining music from Talking Heads’ Remain In [...]
