We've wrestled with the new fun. for quite a while now. We loved their debut, and we're admittedly in the bag for singer Nate Ruess' previous band The Format. So we had huge expectations for the sophomore effort Some Nights. Next thing we know the band's teaming up with live powerhouse but studio enigma Janealle Monae, employing autotune and (WHAT?!) partnering with GLEE to debut a single. more ›

Can Sleigh Bells hit two home runs in a row? Maybe. more ›

This year a popular trend in year-end lists seems to be critics bemoaning the fact they have to construct year-end lists, but that they do so because the public expects it of them. This is bullshit. Critics love year-end lists; what the current crop of music writers is actually bemoaning is the fact that every year-end list looks like a carbon copy of everyone else's. This is due to two things: 1) Everyone likes to pretend that there is actually some sort of consensus on what constitutes a "best" album and 2) after a decade of fluctuation we've finally resettled back into a familiar music biz model of gatekeepers proclaiming which artists are worthy of mass consumption. more ›

It was a good year for live music in Chicago so we asked a couple members of our music writing team to pipe in with their personal favorite moments. more ›

The debut album from Glossies, Phantom Films, is going to sound pretty familiar to even to casual fans of the local music scene. It will probably remind you an awful lot of output from OFFICE, currently on hiatus, and that would make a lot of sense since it's the latest nom de chanson of the leader of that group, Scott Masson. When he tipped us off to his new project it came with the warning that it was weirder than his previous output so he was hoping listeners would be patient and put up with some of his odder tendencies. more ›

Fabric, the legendary London dance club, has for the last decade purveyed its modus operandi in the form of special guest mixes. Notable alumni of the FabricLive series include James Murphy, Diplo, Simain Mobile Disco, Four Tet, Cut Copy, Pearson Sound, and John Peel, whom only begin to scratch the surface of the series' proud history. The latest, FabricLive 60, comes from Brodinski, a well-traveled and eclectic DJ whose affinity for genre-hopping shines bright on the mix. more ›

"Crazy clown time," chirps David Lynch, with demented glee. "It was fun. It was real fun." The master filmmaker and artist definitely lives up to his first solo album's title. more ›

With each release Soft Speaker grows more confident in the compositional prowess and the musical interplay grows ever deeper as the band grows more comfortable with their skills at developing ever thickening tickets of sound. more ›

Jane's Addiction has been around quite a while, and gone through the breakup / regroup thing quite a few times, but for a band that's been around over two decades their recorded output is pretty minimal. Unlike most bands with similar lifespans Jane's Addiction seems to only record when they feel like it, and as a result their material stands up. Granted, more recent albums from the band will never pack the punch of Nothing's Shocking or Ritual De Lo Habitual that owes much to the fact that so many bands have run through the door Jane's Addiction opened, taking bits and pieces of the band's sound as they went through. more ›

On the occasion of his new album Spacer, we interview the Chicago jazz musician who makes playing the vibes sexy as hell. more ›

Wilco has found a pleasant pace the band is obviously pretty comfortable with now. Their new album The Whole Love sees them crafting a collection of pretty tight little pop rockers that will satisfy most. more ›

When you take Carrie Brownstein, Janet Weiss, Mary Timony and Rebecca Cole and put them together it reads like some indie rock dream equation: more ›

Core duo -- Brad Elvis and Chloe F. Orwell -- have been bouncing around town making music as The Handcuffs for close to a decade now. They traffic in a canny mixture of glam and pop that owes equal debt to the '70s and '80s while striving to be something of the present day; relevance with a back-story. more ›

The Features' latest album, Wilderness, is on a label run by the Kings of Leon. This makes total sense. If Kings of Leon are to atone for their sins against music we can think of no better penance than to expose the firebrand that is The Features to the wider public. more ›

We hated the first album from The Horrors, deeming it juvenile screeching best left in the garage. On their second disc we saw the group making progress but ultimately still felt they were faking it. So that leads us to ask this obvious question after hearing the band's newest album Skying; who are these guys and what have they done with The Horrors? more ›

For immediately appealing indie-rock equally filled with sonic surprises and familiar melodiousness, it’s hard to do better than Chicago’s Pet Lions. more ›

The first time we heard about Peter Silberman's project The Antlers was when they released the lineup for the 2009 Pitchfork Music Festival. That year alone, we were inundated with releases from an army of fellow Brooklyn indie-hipster bands like Dirty Projectors, Real Estate and Bear In Heaven, and, really, we just had it up to our eyelids with that particular scene. When we had the opportunity to catch them at the Fest on that cold, rainy Saturday afternoon underneath that canopy of of tall, slender birch trees that dot the landscape of the C-Stage, we were taken a-back by the unadorned, yet complex beauty of their performance. The combination of Silberman's willowy falsetto and warm, glowing electric guitar and the rain falling ever-so-gently upon us seemed to transcend the hipster the electro-afro-beats that dominated that year's sound aesthetic. more ›

Twenty years. Ten albums (not counting live albums, EPs or rarities compilations). One band. And at this point, even after they've cranked out so much material over such a long period of time, Sloan remains just as an amazingly vital and prolific a band as ever. In fact, despite the band's future seeming in doubt just a few years ago, the quartet from Halifax seems to be experiencing a bit of a renaissance. more ›

This Austin, Texas quintet have made their mark on the music scene by combining their love of '60s garage and psychedelia and carefully mixing it with a more down-tempo, fuzzed-out, nod to the early '90s drone era led by head rock heroes like Spectrum and Jay Spaceman. Formed in 2004 and named for the classic dark and enigmatic Velvet Underground song The Black Angel's Death Song, it's not surprising that much of their catalog takes a similar morose and foreboding tone. more ›

Imagine surf-guitar god Dick Dale burning in hell, lonely and forgotten. Or, if that thought exercise proves to be too cruel and sadistic (gee, wonder why), picture instead Black Sabbath covering Dale’s Pulp Fiction--appropriated classic “Miserlou.” That opening sixteenth note machine-gun riff, now played on a downtuned guitar, moves like a bat out of Hades, and it probably sounds a lot like “Fallen,” the opening salvo on Bloodiest’s debut record Descent. more ›

The Strokes may have kept waiting everyone forever for their latest album Angles, but at least they delivered a disc that sounds exactly like what you'd expect from The Strokes. And what more could you ask for? In fact, the quartet from NYC would probably piss folks off if they deviated too far from their sound. Hell, they moved a smidge off target by attempting to open their sound on First Impressions of Earth and got eviscerated, which actually, the more we think about it makes no sense since they also caught flak for their sophomore album since it didn't change at all. For once we're beginning to realize that eternally bored look deadening the center of Julian Casablancas' eye may be more defense mechanism than affectation at this point. more ›

To say Lupe Fiasco's third album Lasers had a difficult time getting released would be quite the understatement. Fiasco battled with his label over the disc's content, his fans rallied behind his cause, and much text, print and electronic, was dedicated to Lasers' protracted gestation period and difficult birth. So it's remarkable that the album the battle was over would end up to be the most musically focused and easily accessible of Fiasco's career. more ›

Just about every important music media outlet has already formulated opinions on Radiohead's latest album, The King Of Limbs. They had to. As Steven Hyden of A.V. Club pointed out, coverage for The King Of Limbs "played out like breaking news—by the end of the day Friday, after tens of thousands of people had already given their yays or nays on the record on Facebook and Twitter, reviews started appearing in major publications like Esquire and NME." The need to stay relevant and compete for the advertising dollar meant that one couldn't really reserve judgment on the biggest release of the year. Fortunately for us, we've been afforded some semblance of time to ruminate, pontificate and debate the quality of Radiohead's eighth studio album. Our verdict: one of their finest. more ›

Old Friends was recorded in less than a week, and many of the members of Norway's I Was A King had even heard the material before heading into the studio. This nugget of info is remarkable primarily because once you you hear the album it seem unbelievable that the band didn't live with the songs for years before committing them to tape. The end result is an album that sounds loose but firmly inhabited by a group secure in their mission. more ›

Monotonix is not about progress, unless you count fighting your way out of the La Brea Tar Pits as progress. This is proto-metal that thunders along like an angry woolly mammoth, only recently thawed, hungry to make up for lost time. But, see, the thing is that they can't change. Monotonix is channeling all the pent up passions that lie deep in the collective psyche, and they allow release through their turbulent music. And the music is only a segment of the process, because it forms the backdrop to their live shows, and that's where the cacophony truly threatens to break through dimensional walls. more ›

We’re always excited when a Chicago group starts to garner a bunch of buzz in the music world so when we started hearing good things about Smith Westerns describing them as a garage group wise beyond their years and full of incredible hooks we got pretty excited. Until we heard their debut album, a lo-fi mess that was so dense no melody could penetrate it and so unlike the descriptions of the band we were convinced they must have made some unholy deal with the gods of blog buzz in order to accumulate the positive write-ups. So we were honestly shocked (and a little hopeful) when the “Weekend,” the first single off their sophomore effort Dye It Blonde, turned out to be a perfectly crafted little piece of sunny, ‘70s pop. Suddenly our disdain for the band turned into high hopes. Were we wrong about Smith Westerns all along? more ›

Last year I observed that while there was a lot of good music still coming out, almost like a fire hose at this point, there seems to be a dearth of great music. This year finds me feeling no differently. There was lots of stuff this year to admire, and I’m not going to pretend I spent any real amount of time grimacing through stuff I had t review or simply grow familiar with in order to stay current with the prevailing tastes, both popular and critical. But as the year draws to a close I find myself shunning much of what I initially viewed as “artistic achievements” in favor for music I think has the actual legs to still pop up without me wincing a few years down the road. So once I finished my list no one could have bee more surprised than I at how it ended up. more ›

Chicago is an alt-country kind of town. From dearly departed, then suddenly reunited groups like The Blacks, to well-known alt-superstars like Wilco, to adventurous up-and-comers like Judson Claiborne and Tom Schraeder, the Windy City has seen more than its fair share of troubadours and chanteuses donning an acoustic guitar in one hand, and a bag full of post-modern production tricks in the other. Whether or not they successfully update country-and-western musical formulas to the 21st century is a post for another day. The point is, to get your foot in the (barnyard?) door with this crowded bunch, you have to stand out. Local sextet Dastardly may mockingly bemoan the fact that they’re neither pretty enough for the mainstream nor weird enough for the underground on their new EP, May You Never. But, based on the seven-track collection of jaunty, steadily satisfying tunes, they’ll soon have to ward off attention from both music factions, whether they’re ready for it or not. more ›

My Chemical Romance scrapped an entire album, ostensibly returning them to their raw rock and/or roll roots after the wonderfully bombastic The Black Parade, before starting work on Danger Days: The True Lives Of The Fabulous Killjoys. Danger Days returns to the grand notions and sounds of The Black Parade but continues to scrape off the band’s final layers of gothic screamo in favors of stadium pop polish. It seems My Chemical Romance is a band unable to give up its excessive tendencies, something we’re frankly glad to see. In an era where most stadium rock is empty bombast (see: a certain Hollywood heartthrob’s musical side-project that’s gone on 30 Seconds too long) is gratifying to see a band gleefully embrace pretension and fill it with winks rather than wince-worthy moments. more ›

“Kanye West” is a publicly developing art project. His “Loading … In Progress” bar never reaches completion. We get snapshots of certain moments of his development - his Tweets, his G.O.O.D. Friday tracks, his junk - and this is all fascinating stuff to be sure. But none of this would continue to fascinate us if the man didn’t have the fucking talent to back it up. His latest album, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, once again provides him the bedrock upon which to lay his bravado (and insecurities), and the resulting construct swirls into the sky to overshadow West's peers (if he can even be said to have peers any more). more ›