It’s getting toward the middle of the year, which means it’s the time when music bloggers start looking back at the year so far. It’s been an excellent year for music thus far, and we’ll be getting to the best of 2013 in due course, but given that the last week has been given over to a mystifying wave of hype over hitherto largely unheralded UK siblings Disclosure, it seems a good time to survey the fact that 2013 has also been a year in which people have gotten very, very excited over certain albums, so much so that I suspect we may find ourselves looking back in due course and asking ourselves quite what we were thinking. With this in mind, here are the most overhyped albums of the year to date. To clarify: these albums aren’t necessarily bad, although some definitely are. They’re just a study in the way that Internet hype can snowball. … Read More
Azealia Banks
Watch the Video for Azealia Banks’ “Young Rapunxel”
Azealia Banks has released the video for “Young Rapunxel,” the single she’s been rolling out for weeks. The Lil Internet-produced… Read More
The 10 Best New Songs We Heard This Week: Joanna Newsom, Beaches
Over the last year or so, we’ve been spending our Friday mornings rounding up the best downloadable MP3s from around the web. Over that time, it’s become clear that the (legally) downloadable MP3 is in something of a decline — the advent of Soundcloud and Bandcamp has meant that bands are far more inclined to stream their work than offer it up for free, which is entirely fair enough, and it’s also meant that of late we’ve missed being able to share a whole bunch of new music that wasn’t downloadable. So from here on in, we’re sharing the best new songs we’ve heard over the course of the week, and offering them up for you to stream at your leisure. This inaugural edition features work from Joanna Newsom, Beaches, Dam-Funk, Motion Sickness of Time Travel, and plenty more. Happy Friday! … Read More
10 MP3s You Need to Download for Free This Week: Yo La Tengo, Kurt Vile
It’s Friday, which means that we’re very much looking forward to a post-work drink, and also that it’s time for our regular roundup of new music to get your hands on this week. Today we’ve got a rather lovely meandering ten-minute single from Kurt Vile, a great new track from ex-Devastations types Standish/Carlyon, new work from Flavorpill faves Scott & Charlene’s Wedding and Pure X, a pretty fantastic extended mix by Chris Carter… and, yes, Azealia Banks. Remember her? None of this will cost you a dime, so we suggest you click through and get downloading ASAP. … Read More
Azealia Banks and the Other “F” Word in 2013
“Faggot means coward, liar, backstabber, energy stealer, blood sucker.” So quoth Azealia Banks on her Twitter this morning, returning to the issue that’s rather overshadowed her music of late: her penchant for fighting with snarky “celebrity blogger” and cultural irrelevance Perez Hilton, and for doing so by throwing around the word “faggot” as liberally as possible. Banks and Hilton were going at it again last night, arguing about… well, something or other, an argument that ended with Banks calling Hilton, yes, an “evil faggot.” So far, so predictable, tiresome, and generally unimpressive. … Read More
The 10 Albums You Need to Hear in February
Right, so January is over and done with, and it’s time to get back into the usual music industry swing of things (at least until everyone goes to get wankered at SXSW, anyway.) There are plenty of decent records to be heard in February 2013, so without further ado, here is our regular monthly roundup of the albums we reckon are going to be worth hearing over the next four weeks, from brainy electronica to decidedly brainless sea shanties, with a whole bunch of other stuff in between. If there’s anything we missed, do feel free to take to the comments section and let us know! … Read More
50 Reasons to Be Excited About Pop Music In 2013
It is a truth universally acknowledged that in event of a nuclear holocaust two things will persist: cockroaches and pop music. In our monthly Pop for Skeptics column, Rohin Guha explains how the latter need not be a terrifying thing to navigate, nuclear holocaust or not.
No pop fan really knows what to do with himself in January. It’s a special time of year when new fads are still being cooked up and otherwise unremarkable artists — nice to see you again, Nicole Scherzinger! — stand a fair shot at selling more than just a couple records. Some enterprising pop oracles might consult science, the stars, and mathematical trends to make all kinds of predictions about what is set to become “the next big thing.” Others, like me, will wait until some stuff has happened to do that. Sure, with January finally over and done with, it’s probably a bit too late to be making prognostications about what we should look forward to in pop this year, but to borrow a phrase from last year: YOLO. Below, then, are precisely 50 reasons to look forward to pop music in 2013. … Read More
10 New Tracks You Need to Hear This Week: Sufjan Stevens, Factory Floor
It’s Friday, which means the first working week of 2013 is over — rejoice! It also means that it’s time for us to round up the 10 most noteworthy tracks of the week that’s gone by, and happily there’s some decent tunes to be had again after a pretty fallow holiday week. Specifically, there’s a hitherto unreleased Sufjan Stevens track, new Factory Floor, a bunch of interesting remixes involving everything from shoegaze to neo-R&B, Skrillex aping Burial to hilarious effect… and, yes, the depressing Azealia Banks/Angel Haze shitfight. Click through and get listening. … Read More
Our 15 Most Anticipated Albums of 2013
We have good vibes in general about the year to come, and we’re hoping that it holds as much musical goodness as 2012 did. The early part of the year is certainly shaping up well, and we’ve put together a kind of extended edition of our regular monthly album release preview, looking at the 15 albums (with confirmed release dates) that we’re hanging out for in the new year, in addition to a roundup of records that are rumored/don’t have firm release… Read More
20 Classic Female-Fronted Hip Hop Tracks
Oh, Rolling Stone. Sometimes you make it so easy. We try not to spend too much of our time nitpicking the amusingly out-of-touch pontifications of Jann Wenner’s empire, but occasionally something comes along that annoys us so much that it’s hard not to react. So it was recently, when the magazine’s editors came back from the mountain with stone tablets purporting to contain “The 50 Greatest Hip-Hop Songs of All Time.” In fairness, reading RS for hip hop recommendations is like reading Trucking Monthly for advice on bicycles, but even so, if you’re going to claim to make a definitive list, you don’t relegate Nas’s “NY State of Mind” to #31 (11 places behind 50 Cent’s risible “In Da Club”) — and, more annoyingly, you don’t make the mistake of including only three songs featuring female vocalists. … Read More
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