“She looks like a Babylonian Gorgon,” a reviewer once wrote of Alice Bag in a show review. Her then-band, the Bags, was at the forefront of the late seventies punk scene in Bag’s native Los Angeles.  …more

Jeremy Thal, who serves as a band leader for Briars of North America, is one of my oldest friends. We took Suzuki violin lessons together in Madison, Wisconsin, and our first instruments were fruit roll-up boxes with rulers taped on them. …more

A review of The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller — a live documentary by Academy Award-nominated director Sam Green, with performance by Yo La Tengo, Tuesday, May 1, 2012, at SFMOMA. …more

In June of 1967, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band came out. Brian Wilson is said to have heard it and wept. Wilson, the Beach Boys’ main songwriter, producer, erstwhile bass player, and singer-of-high-harmonies, knew he’d lost the race with the Beatles. …more

I was fourteen when Strange Little Girls was released and I was fifteen when my parents decided to separate. …more

Since 2005, Larkin Grimm has made four albums, the first of which are unvarnished howls from the world of psychedelic folk. …more

Jon DeRosa is best known for leading the drone-pop collective Aarktica. Late last year DeRosa kicked off a new solo pop project with the release of the Anchored EP. …more

I didn’t know Whitney Houston, and yet there I was, weeping. I’d read the Tweets, watched the videos, and re-posted a video of her singing “I’m Changing” live from when she was very young and so pretty that it remains  almost painful to look at her, even now after all these years. …more

While the electric guitar marks a departure from Todd Snider’s last few records, Agnostic Hymns and Stoner Fables falls squarely into the groove he hit after 2004’s East Nashville Skyline. A laid back traditionalist whose wry lyrics belie his stoner persona, Snider trades in smart, sharply observed songs delineating the travails of American have-nots. …more

I’ll admit I’m obsessive about dates in general, and music-related dates most of all. So when I started using the music-streaming service Spotify, I was pleased to see a year listed next to the name of every album in their expansive library—presumably the year when the recording was released, which I consider crucial information. …more

Aussie Geoffrey O’Connor, has been the lead of the band Crayon Fields, a Melbourne-based indie dream pop act since 2001. He recently released his solo debut Vanity is Forever, which is decadent in infectious dreamy synth lounge hooks. …more

I’ve been thinking a lot about the decline of the Japanese birth rate lately. It’s a peculiar obsession, admittedly, but one that should worry Japan lovers everywhere. And while it wasn’t on my mind as I hurried up Wilshire Boulevard early on the evening of Oct. 1, it would be later as over 2,000 Japanese people spilled into the streets of L.A.’s Korea Town after witnessing a concert by Japanese mega-stars Dreams Come True. …more

Boys For Pele came out around the time I lost my virginity.  This was a very sensitive time in my life, because I knowingly had bad sex with a more experienced partner, and my failure to give her any pleasure resulted in her leaving me for her older, handsomer, and cooler ex-boyfriend who threatened to kick my ass after I obsessively called her dozens of times. …more

With his latest release, Candygram for Mowo, DJ/Bassist/Electronic Artist/Producer/Remixer Adam Dorn, a.k.a Mocean Worker, has whipped up an addictive, luscious confection: a feel-good album that’s a throwback to the dance music of 30s era swing and big band jazz. …more

Rafael Casal is known in the Bay Area hip hop community from his three appearances on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam and his music video Bay Area Slang, where he rattles off 100 slang terms invented in the Bay Area. …more

Icelandic singer-songwriter Sóley Stefánsdóttir has released her first full-length record, We Sink (Morr). This comes after Stefánsdóttir’s debut EP, Theater Island. …more

The one that got me was a torso shot. There were a bunch of them published even before she died, frantic paparazzi pictures of Whitney Houston leaving last night’s party. …more

The early, formative period of rock and roll criticism produced three great and indelible voices, three voices that have gone on to influence every writer who has written about popular music in the years since. Those three voices belong to Richard Meltzer, Lester Bangs, and Greil Marcus. Bangs died young, and Marcus has drifted off into a phase where his muscles, at least to this reader, are more academic than hortatory. …more

Maine-born, Brookyln-based musician Luke Rathborne is still in his early 20s, but he is already off to a promising start.  Rathborne has opened for the Strokes and played with Devendra Banhart, among other accolades. …more

California native Chelsea Wolfe has returned, after her first album, The Grime and the Glow, to the aural world with Ἀποκάλυψις, pronounced “Apokalypsis.” …more

Since the early 1980’s, the 51 year old Scottish musician/writer/provocateur Nicholas Currie, better known as Momus, has been releasing music (his latest album, Hypnoprism, was his 18^th) to varying levels of critical and commercial success. Since the 1990’s, he has been blogging in various forms, most notably on his old LiveJournal called Click Opera, which Warren Ellis called “probably the best-written blog on the Anglophone web” and of which novelist Dennis Cooper said, “It doesn’t get any better than Click Opera.” …more

For an entire decade, between 1975 and 1985, Brian Eno could do no wrong. In fact, even for the four or five years before 1975 he could do no wrong. …more

I call James McMurtry late one morning when I’m visiting Austin, Texas. By now, I’ve seen him play three times, in Arkansas, Oklahoma, and California, and I’m always struck by the way audiences in different parts of the country identify with his songs. …more

Mirah Yom Tov Zeitlyn (born in 1974) came up in the fertile Olympia scene of the late ’90s. She was part of the K Records renaissance along with bands like the Microphones, the Blow and Old Time Relijun – all highly distinct, idiosyncratic groups with Calvin Johnson’s influence perhaps manifesting in the form of a primitivist or intentionally naïve approach. …more

I was 19 years old when I first witnessed the achingly beautiful sounds of Fred and Toody Cole and Andrew Loomis. They were called Dead Moon. …more

Wild Flag, S/T (Merge) / live at The Bowery Ballroom, NYC, 10/18/11

Eleanor Friedberger, best known as half of The Fiery Furnaces, sings the ultra-catchy, ’70s-damaged “My Mistakes.” …more

make me young again / make me well

When I listen to the Mountain Goats I always hear traveling—a ceaseless forward momentum. …more

It’s Christmas morning, 2001 and I’m fifteen. I unwrap a record player, but am more immediately captivated by the record collection that comes with it. …more

The Icelandic musician and composer Jóhann Jóhannsson specializes in disparate, subtly moving themes and careful musings on the ways in which industry and society intersect. …more

Joni Mitchell’s Blue may have been released one summer seven years before I was born, but it’s a winter album that conjures memories of me, my mom and my little sister. …more