The Rumpus Interview with Jesse Sykes
The first thing you notice about Jesse Sykes and the Sweet Hereafter is Sykes’s voice. It’s a stunning blend of contradictions, cutting and vulnerable, breathy and scratchy, enigmatic and bare.
Music
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Writing on music at The Rumpus!
Nick Cave Monday #25: “Abattoir Blues”
Sometimes things get murky in our brains. The depression takes hold. It’s more than melancholy, it’s to the point of absolute despair. “Abattoir Blues” is the title track on the…
ALBUMS OF OUR LIVES: RUN DMC’S RAISING HELL
It was a cassette copy with no case, and my dad gave it to me a couple of years after he’d moved out. I was about nine. I knew enough about…
Swinging Modern Sounds #42: Hey Man, I Thought That You Were Dead
They Might Be Giants had that quality, the glorious-about-human-life quality on December 30th
Nick Cave Monday #24: “Mack The Knife”
One night in January 1995, you may have been alive and lucky enough to have tuned your TV to “Great Performances” a special featuring the music of Kurt Weill. It…
Deep Throat #1: On Being and Unbeing a Singer
When I shut my mouth I lost a part of myself so ingrained, so accustomed, so integral I had not even known it was possible to lose it.
Nick Cave Monday #23: “Hard On For Love”
It was 1994. Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds were performing The Fillmore in San Francisco. I was crushed against the stage and Blixa Bargeld strummed his guitar in front…
THE RUMPUS INTERVIEW WITH ERIN MCKEOWN
McKeown’s crowd-funded new album, Manifestra, is a dizzying ten-track blend of political blues and party songs, featuring radio-friendly handclaps, a New Orleans-style funeral march, and a jam she co-wrote with Rachel Maddow.
Swinging Modern Sounds #41: Utopian Communities
Bands, those funny little plans, that never go quite right, is a line from a really great song by Mercury Rev (“Holes,” from Deserter’s Songs), a song that rightly probes…
Rumpus Sound Takes: Creeping Familiarity
Essentially a one-man band—the project of Oregon native and current Oxford, Mississippi resident Deepak Mantena—Junk Culture here explores traditional pop song forms in lieu of the heavily sampled dance music Mantena created on two previous EPs.
Nick Cave Monday #22: “Jubilee Street”
Goth girls everywhere will soon breathe a collective sigh of relief causing a variance in the Earth’s orbit. We have been waiting since 2008 for a new Bad Seeds record…
Albums of Our Lives: The Thermals’ The Body The Blood The Machine
It begins with an act of divine intervention. “God reached his hand down from the sky,” sings Hutch Harris.