Music

Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan Ramblin’ Man (V2) Who says long-distance relationships never work? Despite being separated by some 8,000 miles, Isobel Campbell, of Glasgow, and Mark Lanegan, of Los Angeles, have brought us Ramblin’ Man, a four-song collaboration that wouldn’t have been possible without the Internet (tsk, tsk — and you thought it was all […]

Dear Bill O’Reilly: As a godless liberal, I have no reason to like you. Your unctuous smirk and smarmy patter got on my nerves when you were a lowly late-night infotainer; since you’ve resurrected yourself as a right-wing demagogue, you’ve gone from annoying to insufferable. But Christmas time’s a-comin’, after all, and in the spirit […]

Mi and L’au Mi and L’au (Young God Records) You don’t know Mi and L’au, but you know a couple like them: beautiful, blissfully in love, and, well, sometimes a bit of a drag. They’re so into each other, so deeply connected and complete in themselves, that being around them feels vaguely creepy, as if […]

here are comebacks, and then there are comebacks. The gap between British folksinger Vashti Bunyan’s debut, Just Another Diamond Day, and its follow-up, Lookaftering, lasted 35 years. By music-biz standards, that’s an eternity, at least enough time for one pop tart to be born (or, more accurately, spawned in the lab), to enact three or four […]

The Fiery Furnaces Rehearsing My Choir (Rough Trade) If you thought Blueberry Boat was a buttload of bull, steer clear of Rehearsing My Choir, a wildly pretentious tour de force that’s sure to alienate all but the most ardent Fiery Furnaces fans. Rehearsing, the duo’s fourth full-length, is a collaboration between the Friedberger siblings and […]

Almost no one reads poetry anymore, which means that you probably haven’t read Actual Air, one of the very few poetry collections written by a working singer/songwriter that’s worth a damn (sorry, Jewel). Praised by former poet laureate Billy Collins and The New Yorker, the book proves that David Berman isn’t just another singer/songwriter with delusions […]

Unless we’re talking about, oh, I don’t know, Ken Mehlman’s sex life, there are no guilty pleasures. If pleasures could induce guilt, confessing them wouldn’t be the hipster’s favorite parlor game, the subject of so many self-aggrandizing/self-effacing conversations in which Totally Unique Rockdudes strive to outdo one another by professing/confessing their not-so-secret love for Hall […]

Love Kraft, the Super Furry Animals’ seventh studio album, begins with a splash — literally. It’s the sound of guitarist Huw “Bunf” Bunford diving into a swimming pool, and, given the fact that there are no accidents in the SFA cosmology, the effect would seem to serve some kind of symbolic function, to augur a baptism […]

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 […]