Happy New Year, everyone! Wasn’t 2007 nuts? Now that’s out of the way, let’s get to the business at hand: 2008 is going to be a banner year for music, despite all the doomsayers of the supposedly dying industry. To wit, here’s a look at some
The rigidity of Christmas tradition is most evident in the ubiquity of its music. As unsavory as I find so many other aspects of the season—the false sentiment, the terrible TV programming, the hyper-commoditization—it’s the music that has become truly inescapable. It begins a week or
This week, a new monthly feature in the Mp3 Digest, provided the RIAA’s black ops don’t take me under cover of night to an undisclosed location for all sorts of beastly torture. We’ve scoured the corners of the internet to bring you songs leaked from the coming
The holidays have arrived. Thanksgiving is tomorrow, Black Friday looms imminently on the other side, and then it’s a mad dash to whatever your religion or creed suggests you celebrate at one of the highest spiritual points of the year. Since I’m sure everyone is going to hear
My Bloody Valentine’s shoegazer-defining Loveless still finds incredible favor among critics and listeners alike and is generally assumed to be one of the best albums ever. The dudes at Pitchfork even give it a second-place spot to Radiohead’s OK Computer on their best of the ’90s
While I usually try to share true and pertinent information about the bands featured here, this week I’ve scoured the web for songs I like from bands I’ve never heard of. (And please, there’s no need for any of that childish “Man, I can’t believe you
Just over 30 years ago, followinginauspiciousbeginnings, a relative unknown starred in a film he’d written about a scrappy boxer with big dreams who miraculously both beats the champ in a title match and turns “yo” into a catchphrase. Equally miraculously, the film went on to win three Academy Awards
To some, I’m sure I sound like a raving madman when I say there was ever such a thing as New Coke or Cassingles. Thanks to the internet I can usually prove that such marvelous things did once exist, but there seems to be only so much the uninitiated
When you really think about it, a vampire weekend sounds either incredibly lame (as in hanging out in the cemetery with a bunch of goths, drinking cheap red wine, and reading aloud from Anne Rice novels) or absolutely horrifying (as in spending a few days trying to escape thirsty hordes
Pop music is at it’s best when it’s not actually pop music, but a teeming, cacophonous, and experimental diversion from pop book-ended by an otherwise unassuming, jaunty indie-pop song. Or so out-of-and-back-into-nowhere Danish band Kirsten Ketsjer makes me believe. The song
