Azar Swan

The 10 Best New Songs We Heard This Week: Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Phoenix

It’s Friday afternoon, which means that a band just finished playing in our office, and also that it’s time to recap all the best new songs we heard during the past week. In the past few days, we got more than a little obsessed with the new Majical Cloudz song — and as well as that, there’s another most excellent Phoenix remix, Iron and Wine getting all 19th century on us, surprisingly good new stuff from Primal Scream and Tricky, unsurprisingly good new stuff from Azar Swan and Kelpe, and plenty more. Get streaming and/or downloading, peoples! … Read More

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A Selection of New Bands for People Stuck in the ’90s

One of the more chastening aspects of getting older is watching the creeping advent of cultural conservatism laying its clammy hands on your generational contemporaries. We warned against the dangers of such conservatism and its attendant revivalism earlier this week in lambasting Foxygen’s new album, and it’s kinda terrifying to start to hear people say things like, “Oh, all the good albums were made in the ’90s.” If you’re also hearing similar things, we humbly suggest that you introduce your friends to the bands after the jump, bands whose sounds recall various ’90s acts while managing to avoid sounding like tiresome cover acts. Who’d have thought it, eh? … Read More

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A Selection of New Bands for People Stuck in the '90s

One of the more chastening aspects of getting older is watching the creeping advent of cultural conservatism laying its clammy hands on your generational contemporaries. We warned against the dangers of such conservatism and its attendant revivalism earlier this week in lambasting Foxygen’s new album, and it’s kinda terrifying to start to hear people say things like, “Oh, all the good albums were made in the ’90s.” If you’re also hearing similar things, we humbly suggest that you introduce your friends to the bands after the jump, bands whose sounds recall various ’90s acts while managing to avoid sounding like tiresome cover acts. Who’d have thought it, eh? … Read More

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The 10 Best Dark and Weird Electronic Albums of 2012

We’re not ones for preemptively compiling “best of the year” lists, particularly in music. There’s always one or two records or, as is coming increasingly more common, a small flurry of mixtapes that drop at the tail end of December that cause us obsessive, neurotic critics to compulsively rearrange our lists (see: last year, and The Weeknd’s Echoes of Silence, his surprisingly perfect ending to a trilogy that most thought lagged a bit in the center). That said, we’re ready to put a lock down on 2012 as it relates to the year’s releases in the brilliantly flourishing “weird” dark electronic scene. We’re living in a post-witch house landscape now, where the pop music landscape is slurring and blurring into a weird, dark hybrid of what we used to know… and that’s an awesome thing. It allows for the likes of Charli XCX’s Super Ultra tape to rub against the epic void of releases from Blackest Ever Black. So, in this festive time of year, let’s get dark. … Read More

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