Music

You don’t intend to watch American Idol,  really you don’t, but like millions of your lumpen brethren, you find yourself prostrate on the couch every week, gawking at the televised trainwreck. Simon, Paula, and Randy make their predictable assessments, but it’s the viewers who decide, by way of telephone and text messaging, the outcome of […]

Like most worthwhile artists, the Los Angeles-based folk singer Mia Doi Todd is a mess of contradictions. This slipperiness, this ability to be simultaneously one thing and its opposite, makes listening to her interesting, but it makes describing her difficult. How can a singer sound both intimate and declamatory, both pretentious and plainspoken? Where does […]

Besides being a character in a William S. Burroughs novel, Clem Snide is a band, a funny and touching alt-countrified/indie-rock band whose frontman and singer/songwriter, Eef Barzelay, is often accused of being too clever for his own good. For many music fans — especially those passionately invested in their own sense of uniqueness — cleverness […]

The consensus on The Great Destroyer, Low’s seventh full-length and first for Sub Pop, is that it represents a Great Departure. Adjectives that have never before appeared in reviews of the Duluth, Minn.-based trio — “aggressive,” “loud,” “rocking” — have been edging out the usual descriptors (“hushed,” “narcoleptic,” “austere”). If anyone took rock critics halfway […]

Sure, globalization has its drawbacks: McDonald’s in the ruins, Wal-Marts in the rainforest, Guatemalan peasants quoting Dr. Phil. Sometimes, though, it’s pretty great, and Maya Arulpragasam, a Sri Lanka–raised, London-based MC who goes by the tag M.I.A., is all the proof you need that a shrunken, mongrelized, borderless world doesn’t necessarily mean oppression and colonialism […]