Since debuting as the hyperliterate, bespectacled nerd prince of the new wave era on 1977’s My Aim Is True, British singer/songwriter Declan MacManus has worn many musical guises, but always under his gaudy stage name Elvis Costello. Over half of his albums have been with the core backing trio of pianist Steve Nieve, drummer Pete […]
Calendar years have never felt more meaningless. It’s 2022? Hooray. This will be the year I…stay inside a lot. But we can still count on music lists to help us organize our calendars. So here’s our latest: 22 Artists to Watch in 2022. (See what we did with the numbers there? Embrace the chaos.) This […]
The late, great Lester Bangs once wrote that we will never again agree on anything as we agreed on Elvis. And he was basically right until Lil Nas X came sliding down the stripper-pole to Hell. Oh, 2021. You rocked us like a damn sociopath. What an insanely exciting, emotional, and reinvigorating year for music. […]
A browse through any thrift store music section shows that some genres of music are definitely more disposable than others. Nobody wants classical compilations, generic folk, mediocre gospel, any kind of polka, and, especially, Christmas music. It shouldn’t come as a surprise; it’s listened to roughly 17% of the year. The other 300-some days, it’s […]
Let me first say that I didn’t grow up watching Christmas movies. The headline should have given that away. I did dabble in the viewing of Frosty the Snowman as a child and I knew all the Christmas songs because I went to a public school. But classic movies like Miracle on 34th Street and […]
A pair of rappers pulling off the best Tom Tom Club sample since Mariah Carey’s “Fantasy” (G Perico & Rucci), an iconic New Wave band trafficking in tongue-in-cheek nostalgia (Duran Duran), a blackgaze act embracing their love of vocal harmony (Deafheaven), and psych-rockers using the shopping mall as a metaphor for capitalist greed (My Morning […]
Back in June, SPIN published The 30 Best Albums of 2021 (So Far), rounding up everything from mainstream rock to experimental hip-hop. Six months later, we’re back with our year-end recap — and it’s interesting how, even though the stylistic balance has stayed consistent, the picks themselves haven’t. While this list also covers a lot of […]
While it’s fair to say pop culture contains more Christmas songs than ones about the Festival of Lights, it’s also fair to say Christmas songwriters have seriously hit a wall, as almost all popular carols were penned during the 1700s and 1800s. Not the case for Hanukkah tunesmiths, who have only begun to flourish over […]
Sometimes you’re the windshield; sometimes you’re the bug. This bit of philosophical wisdom was imparted to me long ago by a guy whose name I don’t remember, nor can I recall the breakup. I suspect that in this case, I was the windshield. Indeed, sometimes a romantic breakup feels like ballast thrown overboard so your […]
The drummer is the job in a rock band with the highest turnover rate — a cliché lampooned memorably in This is Spinal Tap. And if it takes a few albums for a group’s definitive lineup to click into place, the drummer is often the final piece of the puzzle to arrive. But it’s often […]