For Tom Petty, rock ‘n’ roll means playing a good show for the crowd every night, every week, every month, indefinitely.
Lucas Fagen
Lucas Fagen's favorite artform is popular music, and that means popular music—bland corporate trash and faceless functional product in addition to critically respectable touchstones and obscure dregs of arcana. He writes reviews for Hyperallergic arguing this preference.
LCD Soundsystem Looks in the Mirror, Again
LCD Soundsystem’s American Dream is a passably punkoid rock album, fiery in places, elsewhere clunky.
Where Body Meets Machine
The music of Japanese Breakfast’s Soft Sounds from Another Planet trembles, alive with possibility.
Rappers Rap Big Statements: Tyler the Creator, Vince Staples, Playboi Carti, Logic
Each artist’s new album inhabits its own idiosyncratic sonic universe.
K-Pop Conquers the World
I.U., Day6, Ignito, and Lovelyz release new albums that run from exhausting to simply perfect.
Kendrick Lamar Goes Back to Bangers
Tonally, Damn is Lamar’s definitive album, refining his craft down to its quintessence.
Fifty Years of Wandering in Sgt. Pepper Land
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is better than a merely great rock album — it’s a glorious exemplar of goofy fluffery.
Synthesizer Gloss and Bubblefunk Guitar
With their new album After Laughter, Paramore’s rebel yells have morphed into breezy hooks.
Trapped by Tropes: Spoon, The New Pornographers, Alt-J, Charly Bliss
New albums by four indie-rock bands recycle and repurpose decades-old sounds, sometimes striking out and sometimes succeeding.
Twelve Reasons Why the Chainsmokers Are Failing at Love
Such is the appeal of the blank slate.
The Intentional Fallacy Is Evil: Festival Anthems, Fifty Shades Darker, Workout Motivation, 35 Hits from the ‘70s & ‘80s
With any number of noncanonical, shelf-filling compilations released on the market every day, the failure to review them makes sense, as they’re rarely any good — but rarely doesn’t mean never.