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| Florence and the Machine |
If you've been to Brooklyn venue Shea Stadium in the last few years, you might have encountered Patrick Stickles sitting at the door, selling tickets to shows with crowds far more diminished than those drawn by his band, Titus Andronicus...
Starting a band is easy; an actual career in indie rock is a much tougher proposition these days. Financial success seems harder and harder to come by and saying something new within the context of guitar based music might be even more difficult...
Florence Welch has built her career on the premise that she feels things more painfully and powerfully than anybody else...
As perhaps the last vestige of grown-folks carnality in mainstream music, modern R&B trades in the archetypes of masculinity; sweaty abs and dirty talk pushed by loverboys (Usher) and bad boys (Jodeci)...
Kentish punks lose their edge on record
Slaves are extraordinary fun live: a duo with a singing stand-up drummer and a guitarist prone to playing while being passed across the heads of the audience, and blessed with the underrated gift of being amusing between songs...
Edinburgh hip-hop trio Young Fathers continue to evolve on their sophomore release, so much so that White Men Are Black Men Too could threaten a jump out of the "rap" section of any given record store if it weren't for all the electronic musical mashing and the album's aggressive, provocative title...
At some point it became clear that one of the themes for the first quarter of 2015 would be The Return of the Male Piano Balladeer. Upcoming records from Father John Misty, Matthew E. White, and new kid/not-kid Tobias Jesso Jr. (he’s 29)...
"My cousin said I made it big and it's unusual/ She tried to take a selfie at my Grandma's funeral," Abel Tesfaye sings on "Tell Your Friends", a revealing highlight from his second major label album...
Low will always be considered the quintessential slowcore band, but their real mastery, and the secret to their decades-long vitality, lies in something more intangible than tempo...
Franz Ferdinand and Sparks initially floated the idea of working together in 2004, following the release of the former band's first album, which went platinum, and the latter band's 19th, which didn't chart...
The Philadelphia singer Jazmine Sullivan is such a singular artist there's an easy temptation to contrast her latest album, Reality Show, with everything else—to define her work by its negatives, by the paths it avoids rather than those it follows...
Three tracks into the new U.S. Girls album, Meghan Remy is awoken by a phone call from a girlfriend. She tells her about the bad dream she just had, in which her father emailed her a digital folder containing nude images of Remy taken when she was a child...
Menace is a sensation endemic to footwork, the Chicago-borne genre of heart-racing house music that is predicated on going harder and better than anyone else on the floor...
Decades into his career, Richard Thompson remains a perennial critical favorite, favorite of other musicians, and cult hero; his guitar work (hybrid picking, bizarre tuning, and soloing that never feels too self-indulgent) is unparalleled and his songwriting taut, brainy, dry and dark...
Songhoy Blues are a young and exuberant Malian band who already have a remarkable history behind them. They fled from their homes in the north when radical Islamists overran the region, and on reaching the safety of Bamako, decided to form a band – at which point their fortunes dramatically changed...
In "Papi Pacify", the video that introduced FKA twigs to the wider world, the British pop star stares into the camera as a man (a lover, it should be said) pries his fingers into her gaping mouth...
If you thought that the last word in folky period detail was offered by the Coen brothers in their movie Inside Llewyn Davis, then you’ll be fascinated by Chicago’s Ryley Walker...
...Possessed of a smooth but aching baritone, this Colorado-raised, Iceland-based expat evokes the lushest masters of Seventies rock while delivering sociological commentary and self-deprecating wit offset by dreamlike symphonic-synthetic splendor...
When their self-titled debut clattered out of the Derbyshire village of Castleton in August 2013, it was clear that Drenge were troublemakers of the very best kind. Stroppy, pale-faced brothers Eoin and Rory Loveless looked committed to near-vampirical levels of sun avoidance...
...As with 2013's 'A Bad Wind Blows In My Heart', much of 'West Kirby County Primary' was written and recorded in the 32-year-old's childhood home, and the album sounds appropriately haunted by his memories of people and places...
Two years ago, the world’s greatest n’goni player released the magnificent Jama Ko, an album that matched furious songs about the chaos then threatening Mali with exhilarating solos on the ancient African lute, transformed with electric pick-ups and effects pedal...
What a relief it is that the next big British indie sensation isn't a bunch of anointed lads with stadium-sized savior complexes. Wolf Alice's debut album is one of 2015's most anticipated homegrown debuts, thanks not to them running their mouths or having the right management, but three years of hard touring punctuated by just four EPs...
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