René Spencer Saller

Ebony Eyez 7 Day Cycle (Capitol) The first female rapper from St. Louis to score a major-label deal, Ebony Eyez seems fully aware of her precedent-setting achievement — and maybe a bit defensive about it, too. “Nelly, Chingy, and ’Kwon put us on the map,” she notes. “But niggaz actin’ like a b**h out of […]

Some geniuses are prolific; others take their sweet slowpoke time. Count Marc Anthony Thompson in the latter category. Over a career spanning more than two decades, the iconoclastic singer/songwriter has made exactly five albums: two LPs in 1984 and 1989, which he released under his own name, and three CDs as Chocolate Genius — Black […]

Like Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Fiona Apple’s Extraordinary Machine comes with a juicy backstory about the big, bad recording industry. Wilco, as everyone knows, pleaded artistic integrity when its label charged that the band’s recordings weren’t sufficiently commercial; bolstered by tons of press, Internet buzz, and a big-screen documentary-cum-hagiography, Wilco prevailed. When YHF was eventually released […]

A jazz tribute to Pavement sounds like a bad idea — at best a willfully silly experiment conceived by a gaggle of giggling stoners, at worst a transparent attempt to make aging hipsters feel more sophisticated, the Generation X equivalent of the Moody Blues’ gigging with a symphony orchestra. With a few exceptions, these high-art/low-art […]

As everyone from Homer to Oprah can attest, people love comeback stories, the heartwarming testimonials of odds-beaters and fate-cheaters, the inspirational tales of prodigal sons and hard-luck daughters. To call I’ve Got My Own Hell to Raise a comeback album might make for a better story, but it wouldn’t be accurate. Bettye LaVette, the 59-year-old singer […]

Skeletons and the Girl-Faced Boys Git (Ghostly/Shinkoyo) Stravinsky once opined that Beethoven’s “Grosse Fuge” is an “absolutely contemporary piece of music that will be contemporary forever,” but the problem with such predictions is that time keeps on slippin’, slippin’, slippin’ into the future. As soon as we invent a term to distinguish the art of […]

Most musicians hate to be categorized, rejecting any attempts to label, contextualize, or otherwise rape their divine muse. Because they are, like, totally unique, they tell anyone who is stupid or polite enough to ask what kind of music they play that it can’t be described. “You just have to listen to it, bro,” they […]

In “Exodus Damage,” one of 14 quietly harrowing tracks on his fifth and finest CD, John Vanderslice sings, “No one ever says a word about/So much that happens in the world.” If this is true, it’s not his fault: Among other subjects, Pixel Revolt addresses the youth of Joan Crawford, the escape of a pet […]

Although no one can define it, most of us know pornography when we see it, and we do not approve. Never mind that we’re consuming it in record quantities; we still freak out at the sight of a wayward nipple. It’s strange that something as ubiquitous as porn has so few champions — and such […]

Flamin’ Groovies Shake Some Action (DBK Works) Was there ever a phrase more redolent of rock than “shake some action”? In the annals of horndog eloquence, it’s up there with “Who put the bomp in the bompalompalomp?” and “Tutti frutti oh rootie” — pure Dionysian nonsense, the urgent articulation of the inarticulate speech of the […]

There’s a fine line between “concept” and “gimmick,” and Sufjan Stevens straddles it admirably on Illinois, his fifth album and the second installment of his Fifty States project. Invoking Carl Sandburg as his muse, Stevens commemorates the Prairie State and a motley assemblage of former residents, including Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln, Frank Lloyd Wright, […]

Lizz Wright isn’t the first jazz singer to embrace gospel, blues, folk, and rock, nor is she the first jazz singer to tell interviewers that she’s not really a jazz singer. In fact, the phenomenal success of Norah Jones’ debut, Come Away With Me, shows thatmild heterodoxy has become, if not conventional, at least lucrative. […]