Better Than: Possibly anything I saw at South by Southwest. Danish collective Efterklang came to the Bowery Ballroom on Saturday night bearing gifts. "We asked people on our tour what they wanted to say to New York," frontman Casper Clausen announced, pulling some handwritten letters from his suit ... More >>
Influentialalbums.com is a "quiz" one of your Facebook friends might've posted, boasting "Very few people own 70 or more. How many have you got?" and listing 100 albums ranging from the duh (Blonde on Blonde, Pet Sounds) to the hmmm (Gerry Rafferty? Felt??) to the genuinely bizarre (well, see below) ... More >>
A swirl of gritty, psychedelic guitars and screaming fans with their hands raised to the heavens isn't what you typically think of when you hear gospel. But Dallas-bred group the Relatives have no concern about your or anyone else's preconceived notions of the Lord's music. They weren't concerned in ... More >>
If you can pay rent with the money you make doing what you love, you're lucky as hell--and this isn't lost on the guys of Nada Surf, who are celebrating the two loud and fast decades they've spent together making that dream a reality. "We really love playing together," says lead singer Matthew Caws, ... More >>
Paul Simon and Wynton Marsalis Rose Theater Friday, April 20 Better than: Fighting the jazz wars. "My father was the family bassman," sang Paul Simon on a song from Simon and Garfunkel's last album, a line as true as confessional poetry. Like Paul McCartney and Elvis Costello, Simon grew up as th ... More >>
A good while back, I was envisioning a Grammy-night dogfight between what, at that point, were my two favorite albums of 2011: Lady Gaga's Born This Way and Paul Simon's So Beautiful or So What. (Both ended up on my Pazz & Jop ballot.)I mentioned this to Maura and she said, "No. Adele." Up went my v ... More >>
53. Phil Collins, "Another Day in Paradise" [1991] 52. The 5th Dimension, "Up, Up and Away" [1968] 51. Olivia Newton-John, "I Honestly Love You" [1975] 50. Celine Dion, "My Heart Will Go On" [1999] 49. Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, "A Taste of Honey" [1966] 48. Bobby McFerrin, "Don't ... More >>
Later this week, Billboard is expected to announce its tallies for the biggest hits of 2011. And what a year for music it's been. Remember all those big hits: "Like a G6," "We R Who We R," "Raise Your Glass," "Fuck You!" and "What's My Name?" What's thatyou say the songs I just rattle ... More >>
The sonic muses of Terry Winters, Lisa Yuskavage, John Chiara, Jaime Hernandez, Demetrius Oliver, and James Casebere
Fleet Foxes United Palace Theater Wednesday, May 18 Better than: Staying home and listening to Simon & Garfunkel records. Fleet Foxes' pastoral folk can strike some modern listeners as old-fashioned and derivative. But Wednesday's sold-out performance at the United Palace Theater was a vivid rem ... More >>
Last week, Edible Manhattan hosted the third of their trivia nights at Brooklyn Brewery in Williamsburg, offering prizes as diverse as pounds of coffee, boxes of chocolates, locavoric wines, and, not surprisingly, bottles of Brooklyn Beer. The subject was rock music related to food. Edible M ... More >>
Making the rounds this week is a New York Magazine article entitled "What Was the Hipster?" Written by n 1's Mark Greif, the piece is meant as a critical history of an era pegged to have lasted just 10 years, from 1999 to 2009. The moment supposedly began with the move of Vice magazine from M ... More >>
My slight obsession with Beck's Record Club, wherein he wrangles visiting big-shot musicians into covering ostensibly classic albums in their entirety, is well documented by now, particularly his recent dalliance with INXS' Kick. Here, Brooklyn art-rock siren St. Vincent takes lead on the indestru ... More >>
A fete for the city's favorite folk duo
And so it ends. CR: Michael Becker / FOX An awfully scrub-heavy Idol season came to a head last night with the show's first scrub-free episode, the two contenders the show's been building up all year finally facing each other down and giving this messy, messy year a satisfying conclusion, the ... More >>
I don't want to be too cynical about "Idol Gives Back", the big annual charity-drive American Idol episode, because God knows the thing does more good with ten minutes of on-air banalities than I will ever do with anything in my life. But every year now, the thing is just sitting in the middle of ... More >>
Clip Job: an excerpt every day from the Voice archives. December 28, 1967, Vol. XIII, No. 11 Films by Andrew Sarris "THE GRADUATE" has been adapted by Mike Nichols, Buck Henry, and Calder Willingham from a novel of the same title by Charles Webb. I like the move much better than the book, ... More >>
L MagazineTwin SisterAnother year, another edition of L Magazine's "8 NYC Bands You Need To Hear." Said this last time around, but the point bears repeating: handpicking a barful of relatively intriguing unknowns in this city isn't an easy task, nor has it gotten any simpler in the last 12 months, e ... More >>
Clip Job: an excerpt every day from the Voice archives. November 3, 1966, Vol. XII, No. 3 The Sound of J.D. Salinger Clapping By Richard Goldstein We know about the sound of two hands clapping. We're pretty sure these days what one hand clapping sounds like. But what is the sound of J.D. ... More >>
Alternative link here. The answer to the third of the three questions in yesterday's teaser quiz was The Newbeats, whose song "Bread and Butter" easily made it onto either the 10 Best or Runners-Up lists, but which one? Listen to this Youtube clip and see if can figure out in which position ... More >>
That Bloomberg interview referred to in yesterday's papers is out now in the Brooklyn Paper. In it, the Mayor continues to defend the Atlantic Yards project against what he calls "this small group of people" who oppose it, and to pine after the Frank Gehry design that might have been. With a modish ... More >>
Just a few hours after my fifth "when the hell is the new Battles record coming out?" conversation comes the answer: No idea, but you can hear scraps of it for the first time anywhere, as the press release boldly states, early in September at none other than Terminal 5. Brace yourselves for Warp20 ... More >>
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