Once, The New York Dolls (along with The Heartbreakers) represented all that was best and bawdiest about the primordial NYC punk scene; they were loud-mouthed, swinging, swaggering queens that nobody wanted to fuck with because they had the dangerous chops to back up...
In the years since he released Play, Moby has seemed to try everything he can think of to escape the shadow of his own greatest (read: best commercially received) sound creation. In the ten years since the singer/producer made a mint marketing every song on Play, he...
What do you get when you intermingle the sensibilities and staple motifs of every globally celebrated pop act from the last forty-five years with some of the great melodic outsiders and misfits from the same period? That's the question Patrick Watson asks (and...
At what point does a phenomenon cease being an annual 'big show' and start being regarded as a cultural staple? Granted, there is no shortage of rock n' roll festivals on the North American summer calendar but, since it launched fifteen years ago, the Vans...
Regina Spektor’s latest release is undoubtedly a testament to her limitless creativity. Her fifth full-length studio album to date, Far is an absolute thrilling 13-track voyage through the inexhaustible psyche of one of the most imaginative and versatile...
At some point in life – whether it's intentional or not – everyone begins to subscribe to British utilitarian philosopher John Stuart Mill's Greatest Happiness Principle. While it is true that some people find joy in the rigmarole of trivial...
Side projects are strange creatures. When you really think about it, most people pick up instruments and form bands in the first place because they have something they want to say – some sort of personal thing that they want to get out of themselves and maybe...
Before Steven Spielberg’s life became consumed with oversized battle bots and nuking fridges, he was part of a modest little enterprise known as Indiana Jones. There was without fail in every film a shot of a map with a little red line scraping across the...
I like bands who experiment, expand, who are always trying something new. My favorite artists—David Bowie, Talking Heads, King Crimson, the Beatles, the Who—did this; every album presented something new, took a step in a new direction. At the opposite...
Maybe I'm just simple, but it never occurred to me that Franz Ferdinand might have even one reggae-infused bone in its bandmembers' collective body. No really—did anyone know? The band has always (at least in my mind) been perceived as a slightly new...