Music
Physical Spiky Funk
Put on the new D’Angelo album and you’ll discover fifty-six minutes of music completely hidden behind a veil of static.
Music
Music
Nicki Minaj's Greatest Hits, Hardcore Bangerz Edition
One day far in the future, when Nicki Minaj will have produced maybe three or four more albums and sold tens of billions more, she will release a greatest hits package, and what a wonderful day that will be.
Art
Five Musical Instruments of the Future
Instruments that translate electronic music into physical actions and acoustic instruments that sound as space-age as any synthesizer are just some of the 20 semi-finalists in the 2015 Guthman Musical Instrument Competition.
Art
Data-Driven Music for the Disharmony of New York's Income Inequality
As the 2 train travels from Brooklyn through Manhattan up to the Bronx, it journeys along 49 stations of neighborhoods as varied as Flatbush, the Financial District, and Wakefield.
Music
Azealia Banks Jumps Up and Down
A sizzling keyboard riff slides out of nowhere and bounces around for a few seconds before a metallic snare drum comes in and a woman starts rapping.
Music
Fifty Shades of Lana Del Rey
For many, the mere existence of Lizzie Grant and her alter ego Lana Del Rey serves as a cold slap in the face to the big-budget feminist empowerment campaign enacted by even richer and more famous people like Beyoncé and Lady Gaga.
Music
The Most Sentimental Time of the Year: Christmas Albums in Review
Christmas albums are largely dismissed by mainstream rock critics, and with good reason—consisting mainly of the same old songs over and over again, they’re filler product designed to rake in the cash while the corporate titans who created them take a year off to enjoy private cruises and improve th
Music
Electric Therapeutic Noisefest
Former Sonic Youth frontman Thurston Moore’s new album The Best Day begins with eight downward arpeggios, which is pretty funny given his reputation as an obsessive guitar technician.
Music
Fragments of a Shape
If Shabazz Palaces are the future of rap, as their label claims, then rap is bound for obscurantist whimsy — inventive and engaging though their records are, these proud bohemians have reached such a rarefied level of willful avant-garde perversity that it can take forever to hear how their musical
Music
Taylor Swift, Picture-Perfect
Taylor Swift has become a megaplatinum superstar largely through the construction of an artificial but rather appealing character. To call her the girl next door would downplay the dizzy self-involvement and feisty autonomy that made her a star in the first place.
Music
From Melbourne with Love
Founded by conductor/saxophone whiz Andy Williamson, the Bombay Royale are eleven Australian troublemakers who play their own hammy, modernized style of Bollywood movie music.
Music
Bland in an Interesting Way
If the War on Drugs’s Lost in the Dream is a brilliant soft-pop masterpiece, a theory I am perfectly willing to entertain, it is brilliant in a way more suited to a platinum bestseller than to a critics’ record.