With a population just shy of 2,000, the tiny Louisiana town of Bernice is about as far away as you can get from New Orleans and still live in the Pelican State. Somewhere on a Sunday, in a small Southern church, Robert Finley is singing to a faithful crowd. Now in his 67th year, and […]
Who is Gaspard Augé? Fans know him as the more mysterious member of French electronic duo Justice (which, for a group that only appears with a new album every five years and is better known for smoking cigarettes than actually speaking, is saying a lot). He’s the one with the big hair and the mustache, […]
Don’t let a century’s worth of pop culture fool you — the best of the best barbershop quartets have five voices. Sure, four striped-shirt, straw-hatted, bow-tied bodies — but five voices. The second tenor sets the stage with a lead melody line, which the first tenor lays a high harmony on. The baritone singer handles […]
“We’re all drawn into ourselves — in a collective coma,” Joe Duplantier sings on “Born for One Thing,” the punishing centerpiece of Gojira’s seventh LP. That lyric is crucial to Fortitude, as the French prog/death metal band gaze outward (and occasionally inward) to critique the evils of consumerism and the world’s zombie-like apathy toward watching nature […]
Remember when albums were marketed on TV commercials? (For that matter, remember commercials?) Back in 2003, flipping through channels during a vacation with friends, I was physically startled by the sound of “Inertiatic ESP” — flailing distortion, glass-shatteringly high vocals, drums as mammoth as the Smoky Mountains outside the rec room window of our rental cabin. […]
“Rap is more than just a blessing. It’s mandatory that our generation have this music. Pain is a lot easier to deal with when it’s ours—not just yours.” – DMX, The Source January 1999 DMX fell on Good Friday. In the late hours of April 2, 2021, he was hospitalized following a reported overdose. He […]
To me, music theory is as foreign a concept as the intricacies of cooking meth, and I don’t think I’m alone in that. Sure, I have a basic grasp of scales, and I can read sheet music from my piano lesson days, but as soon as someone mentions the Dorian scale and E-flat-diminished-seventh chords, my […]
“I don’t even think about being an Indigo Girl unless I’m getting interviewed about it,” an upbeat Emily Saliers tells me, as she makes her daughter Cleo, eight, a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. “I’m just, like, slogging through life,” she says, though not at all downtrodden, more in a relatable I’m-a-person-like-everyone-else sort of way. “Got sober–the most […]
The brilliance of Björk can extend interminably outward, filling out the starry firmament from which she finds inspiration and unity. To call Björk unique is an infinite understatement. She’s more of a protean polymath exploring the outer rims of the psyche with an unflappable lust for life. Because, in her own words: “The unknown turns […]
Somehow, some way, it’s baseball season again. Yes, already. Last year’s abbreviated run saw the Los Angeles Dodgers defeat the Tampa Bay Rays in six games to win their first World Series title in 32 years, something that Ben Gibbard predicted in our 2020 preview. As you can imagine, Dodgers fans — especially the ones […]