Music
The injection of pure, uncut soul music into indie rock has been the one thing that has revived that genre's greying body of late. You can hear it in the gospel throwdowns of Magic Mouth, the African swing of Brainstorm, and now, the growling R&B attack of    More

Music Stories Dana Janssen doesn’t stay in one place for too long. During the course of our conversation at Fresh Pot on North Mississippi Avenue...   More

Music Stories Born: In 1959 in Los Angeles. Sounds like: Fluttery, jangly pop that sounds great coming out of a transistor radio.  For fans of: Big Star, Fleetwood Mac, Paul Williams, Jon Brion, Aimee Mann. Latest release: Someday, Hoffs’ third solo album, showcases her ageless voice and heartfelt lyrical explorations of love, heartbreak and growing old gracefully.
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Music "In Zen they say: If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, try it for eight, 16, 32, and so on. Eventually one discovers that it's not boring at all but very interesting." — John CageI've been thinking about that quote a lot this past week in anticipation of a couple upcoming shows, particularly this coming Saturday's performa...   More

Music Stories Formed: In London in 1981. Sounds like: The quick rush of a DMT hit expanded to sometimes-epic lengths.  For fans of: Throbbing Gristle, Coil, 808 State, Brion Gysin, William S. Burroughs, Timo   More

Music Here's the deal: concert reviews are pretty perfunctory, self-indulgent exercises in so-called music criticism. There are enough people taking pictures of or taping big live shows and then uploading those images to the Web that you can see for yourself whether it was a success or not. And if you really wanted to go, wouldn't you have gone? So instead of giving you a blow-by-blow account of the   More

Music Today, we're bringing back Deep Cuts, a feature wherein we zero in on one song by an artist and dig into that song's meaning and inspiration with its creator. In the five years between Jens Lekman's last two albums, quite a lot happened to the Swedish singer-songwriter. Most notably, the 31-year-old moved to Melbourne, Australia, and e...   More

Album Reviews [MISSPELLED BUT UNBOWED] The path Nucular Aminals took to get their third album out was a fraught one. The quartet had planned to travel to Chicago to work with illustrious recording engineer Stev   More

Album Reviews [NIGHTPLAY] Litanic Mask certainly knows how to create and sustain a mood throughout an album. I put the duo’s self-titled record on repeat for a few hours and was surprised at how often it move   More

Music Outer Worlds is a new biweekly column from one of WW's regular music writers, Robert Ham, that will explore those artists, albums and genres which sometimes get short shrift within the pages of our print edition—those musical outliers that work outside the pop music continuum. Jazz is a genre that is never far from my mind, but it ha...   More