Reconsidering Sonic Youth’s ‘Confusion Is Sex’ at 40 Years Old
Sonic Youth’s Confusion Is Sex is impressively raw and uncompromising, thrilling and terrifying as a walk through the Lower East Side in the early 1980s.
Sonic Youth’s Confusion Is Sex is impressively raw and uncompromising, thrilling and terrifying as a walk through the Lower East Side in the early 1980s.
Neutral Milk Hotel’s ambiguous 1988 album, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, suffered a memeified atrocity. But the tides of public opinion rise and fall, and memes come and go.
Unknown Mortal Orchestra return from a five-year hiatus to deliver a double album, V, containing both the best and blandest songs they’ve ever made.
Essentially a re-issue of a 2011 box set with Neutral Milk Hotel’s recorded work, their legacy remains unparalleled even if there’s not much new to exhume.
If you like mid-period Beatles and Byrds, Wilco at their lightest, the Stones at their brightest, and Big Star, you’ll like Daily Worker’s Autofiction.
Scalping the Guru‘s 20 songs come from 1993-1994, just as Guided By Voices were about to release their landmark album Bee Thousand.
Mo Troper collects what sounds like scraps from his previous album and forges a charming spread of 1960s-inspired lo-fi bedroom pop on MTV.
Grace After a Party is a bold and confident debut introducing Jemima Coulter as an artist who straddles the line between the experimental and the accessible.
Indie rocker Kurt Vile returns with the sprawling, pondering, post-pandemic jam (watch my moves). Its best moments entrance and enthrall.
The latest release from the Brooklyn-based jazz trio Scree, Slow Bloom, is a ruminative exercise in low-key jazz dynamics.
From marching band drums to gritty guitar lines to hip-hop beats, the dusty anything-goes soul-pop approach of King Garbage doesn’t have any contemporaries.
Twenty years old, John Darnielle’s unique, emotion-driven songwriting gave the Mountain Goats’ All Hail West Texas unrivaled staying power.