Celebrating Community
My favorite pop stars are all pop stores. Rumors continue to circulate about the next Warner Bros. Prince deluxe reissues in online communities. 2021 came and went without a new box (although the first issue of the shelved Welcome 2 America was a happy surprise). Diamonds & Pearls was a prime contender, the 30th anniversary of its release passing last […]
Stranger from paradise. Sarah La Puerta spent five years working on her first album, in the process moving from Austin, Texas, to upstate New York. The result, Strange Paradise (available on vinyl, cassette and download from Perpetual Doom), is a wonderful, personal, inviting, distancing, obscure, sweet, sappy, wistful set of simple songs rich with layered emotions. La Puerta performs most […]
ON DECK Velvet Underground overloaded. Todd Haynes’ new documentary The Velvet Underground is well worth watching, even if it falls off after John Cale leaves the band, giving only scant attention to the band’s remarkable, self-titled third album and then trickling away with the last one. But watching it got me to go back and dig out a couple of […]
ON DECK Melvins unapologetically unplugged. Way back in 2014, the mighty King Buzzo made his NYC solo debut with an acoustic set at Santos Party House, and it was even more epic than the album (This Machine Kills Artists) he was supporting. The guy is a solid rock star, from the hair to the unaffected vocals to the measured perfection […]
Rock and Roll Priestess Patti Smith Returns to SummerStage (photo by Marissa Blitz) I don’t know how many times I’ve seen Patti Smith. On the street in the West Village one momentarily thrilling winter afternoon, but besides that, in concert, more than a half dozen times, and most of them outdoors. She gives to New York. The first was at […]
On Deck Truth, Prince and the American Way. Last month, the British newspaper The Guardian proudly declared Welcome 2 America the best album of Prince’s last two decades. They’re hardly alone in praising the record Prince shelved in 2010 and, fair enough, Prince never managed to surpass his remarkable album-a-year run from 1984’s Purple Rain to 1988’s Lovesexy. But Prince’s […]
Rock epicness is a tricky proposition. Rock is, or should be, in opposition to all pretension. Epicness, on the other hand, invites pretension. They’re like oil and water—they don’t mix but can be combined, one spreading into a thin, almost invisible film across the other, rendering it unusable. Drinking large amounts of pretentious epic rock can kill you. Rock epicness […]
Marc Ribot is sick of everyone. Or so it seems. Or artists and activists, anyway. And politicians. And cowboys, although they might be a metaphor for one or more of those other categories. Hope—Ribot’s second release with his quick-quitted trio Ceramic Dog in nine months (out June 25 on Northern Spy) and fifth overall—seems to hold little hope, at least […]
Siouxsie and the Banshees released their second record in 1979, after a quick rush to fame and acclaim (in England, anyway) with their first single and debut album the previous year. Join Hands didn’t do much to capitalize on earlier success. The album was tense, unhinged, unnerving, built from the unexpected inspiration of the first world war and informed by […]
The Gang of Four revivalism of the early naughts got one thing terribly wrong. Bloc Party, Franz Ferdinand and their ilk did a reasonable enough job at aping the angular punk-funk sound, but lacked the rigidity. They weren’t fierce. They weren’t disciplined. They seemed to want to have a good time. A generation later, London’s Dry Cleaning is out to […]