Category: Music
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NYC’s indie bands survive Napster, 9/11, gentrification, and their own demons, in Meet Me in the Bathroom
Based on the book of the same name by Lizzy Goodman, Will Lovelace and Dylan Southern’s documentary Meet Me in the Bathroom surveys the early-oughts music scene in New York City, particularly The Moldy Peaches, The Strokes, Interpol, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, LCD Soundsystem, and TV on the Radio. For the health and hygiene of all […]
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Lou Reed and John Cale work through their complex feelings for Andy Warhol in Songs for Drella
When I was a dumb teenager that didn’t know anything about anything, or could tell The Factory from a factory, I first heard Lou Reed through his Transformer and New York albums — the former via the David Bowie connection, and the latter through Rainbow Warriors, a Greenpeace benefit compilation popular at the time. I […]
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The genesis of Genesis in the documentary Together and Apart
This feature-length BBC documentary on the band Genesis comes with more asterisks than a typical rockumentary. First is the lack of occasion — there being no significant milestone in 2014, unless the band’s 47th-ish anniversary means something to somebody. Only further confusing things, the doc was released in different regions as Together and Apart or […]
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Songs That Broke My Heart: U2’s Running to Stand Still
Moreso than most of their peers, U2 is so strongly associated with its hometown that “U2” and “Dublin” are rarely not mentioned in the same breath, often Bono’s own. He and Larry Mullen Jr. were born and raised in Dublin, Adam Clayton and The Edge grew up there, and most importantly, it’s where the four […]
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Massive Attack to reissue Mezzanine as DNA-infused spray paint, and Banksy is certainly not in the band why would you even ask
Our dystopian Black Mirror future is here, too soon. Should we be concerned that, not only is it now possible to encode digital files in DNA, but that it is also already so trivial that it can be commodified by the music industry as a deluxe collectible tchotchke? I’m calling this 2021 Pitchfork headline now: […]
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Radiohead: Meeting People is Easy…
…but being invited to your own party is hard. I remember liking Grant Gee’s Radiohead documentary Meeting People is Easy when I first saw it in the late nineties, but now it just looks like a simplistic feature-length exposé of how music journos are twits that ruin everything.
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Songs That Broke My Heart: Hallelujah by John Cale
Conventional wisdom will tell you nobody did Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” better than Jeff Buckley. The few who disagree are likely of the opinion that nothing beats the original. Here’s a third opinion: the person who transformed Cohen’s song into the modern standard it is today was John Cale. As I started to compile songs for […]
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Albums That Broke My Heart: Sea Change by Beck
You could throw darts at the tracklist from Beck’s 2002 album Sea Change and each song you hit would be sadder than the last. Hence this deviation in format from our ongoing playlist of Songs That Broke My Heart; call it an Album That Broke My Heart. Beck had always been equal parts folk (Mutations) […]
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Songs That Broke My Heart: Days in the Trees (Reich) by No-Man
Any playlist of sad songs I might compile must include No-Man, but it was no easy task to select only one piece from a songbook positively chock full of them. To make my job a bit easier, I went back to the band’s beginnings. Similar in style to their first breakout single “Colours” (a dramatic […]
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The Songs That Broke My Heart
Rock ‘n’ roll is not an everyday conversation topic around our family table, but the improbable longevity of The Rolling Stones was remarkable enough to come up once during dinner. I had recently listened to “Sympathy for the Devil” for the first time in a while, and remarked upon how surprisingly dark and intense it […]