The Beach Boys’ ‘That’s Why God Made the Radio’ Begs to Be Knocked
The Beach Boys’ That’s Why God Made the Radio is unsettling and inoffensive in a way I cannot compare to any album except God Bless Tiny Tim.
The Beach Boys’ That’s Why God Made the Radio is unsettling and inoffensive in a way I cannot compare to any album except God Bless Tiny Tim.
Forty years ago, Roxy Music stepped away from the recording studio, but not before leaving behind an album that defined the 1980s. It’s the ultimate marriage of high concept, high art, and high-quality popular music.
No popular musical instrument has been more frequently maligned than the accordion. Despite gaining hipster cred in the 1990s, its role in pop remains underappreciated.
Three decades ago, the lucid yet obscure (and antiquated yet postmodern) first entry in Stereolab’s superabundant catalog foreshadowed greatness. Peng! is 30.
Many Queen fans might not want to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Hot Space, but the album checks too many quirky boxes to ignore it.
Sinatra at The Sands is my favorite Frank Sinatra performance – cocky, charming but not oily, warm but not soppy. Each listen lays bare the sheer “cuckoo calculation” of it all.
While murder and crime certainly run deep in Claude Chabrol’s world of subterfuge, the dark desires of human nature that provoke them run immeasurably deeper.
The Bends hinted at Radiohead’s potential, but OK Computer allowed Radiohead the freedom to experiment and started their progression to forward-looking music.
Conceived under fraught circumstances and rife with youthful passion, Foo Fighters’ most cherished album, The Colour and the Shape, is also a relic, never to be replicated.
Maroon 5’s sophomore album, It Won’t Be Soon Before Long, pivoted away from their pop-punk beginnings and set them up for a decade of pop culture omnipresence.
Is there such a thing as middle-aged rock? If so, it would sound like Wilco’s Sky Blue Sky with its measured simplicity and reflective intensity.
Thomas Dolby’s 40-year-old debut The Golden Age of Wireless is a definitive synthpop album that raises many questions but only answers a few of them.