Neneh Cherry

The 15 Most Underrated Albums of 2012

It’s December, which means the music industry’s listomania is now in full swing. But wait, if on the off chance you haven’t written your own personal end-of-year list, then have a quick look at this one before you start anointing one of the usual suspects — Grimes, Frank Ocean, Kendrick Lamar, Swans, Fiona Apple, etc. — as the best of 2012. We love all those records, but there are a heap of great albums released in 2012 that we think haven’t gotten anywhere near the amount of end-of-year love they deserve. We profiled some of them in June — read on to find out our selections from the second half of the year, and let us know if you reckon we’ve missed any. … 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

5 Albums to Stream for Free This Week: Fiona Apple, Future of the Left

It’s Monday, which means it’s time to gulp down gallons of coffee and also time for another edition of our regular start-of-the-week stream-a-thon, wherein we scour the Internet for worthy and/or noteworthy albums that are streaming this week at absolutely no cost. Today there’s the arrival of the new Fiona Apple record, which may well be all you need to head straight for the jump and get listening. If not, however, there’s also the new album by Future of the Left, which (despite what Pitchfork might say) is quality, along with beautiful Monday melancholia from Emily Jane White, SpaceGhostPurrp’s 4AD debut, and Neneh Cherry’s collaboration with Swedish jazz types The Thing. Click through and get listening. … Read More