It wasn’t the biggest news in the entertainment world, but to a certain segment of the population it was a big deal when, in 2010, Michael Gira announced Swans would reform. Following a somewhat acrimonious ending in the late 1990s, ...

If Melvins fans have learned anything from the band, it’s that expectations don’t count for much.

Band of Horses’ fourth album, Mirage Rock, is the quietest collection of songs this Seattle/South Carolina quintet has ever recorded, beaming with starry-eyed folk ballads and hazy soft-rock ruminations, harkening back to ’70s legends like Crosby, Stills, and Nash and ...

Last year, we celebrated our 20th anniversary with 20Fest, a downtown-wide music festival that featured nothing but local bands and musicians—and it was awesome. 20Fest raised more than $10,000 for the Joy of Music School, and friends old and new ...

Over the last couple of years, Bird has been trying out a new facet of his sound—one that, while still technically dazzling and lyrically challenging, allow some breathing room. This year’s Break It Yourself is his most relaxed, raw collection ...

For more than a decade, the Bad Plus has been delighting and confounding audiences with its off-kilter brand of jazz.

Bloom, Beach House’s fourth full-length, is their most elegant and subtly eclectic, but all of the Baltimore duo’s essential ingredients are firmly intact: sky-wide layers of rippling, arpeggiated guitar reverb, oceanic mists of organ, the pitter-patter of bone-dry drum machines, ...

There are many words in Nick Zammuto’s dense, challenging music, but you may not find yourself crooning along.

While he may have trouble mustering optimism for the country’s political future, there is plenty about America that Deacon does love. That’s evident from his gorgeous new record, America. The album is at turns fierce and pretty, a meandering symphony ...

There are two things you might notice when you hear the folk duo Milk Carton Kids. The first is that they play a very quiet and restrained kind of folk, deliberate, precise, genteel, and even polite. The second thing you ...

Hamburger’s live performances, often held up as an example of so-called anti-comedy, consist largely of ex-wife jokes, flailing one-liners, and foul-spirited Q&A gags that walk a line between conscious hackery and transcendence.

Barry was once something of a cult comedian, but after spots in TV shows like Flight of the Conchords and movies like Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler, and regular appearances playing himself on Louis C.K.’s Louie, Barry has become, if not ...

Dave Longstreth has never written “songs” in the traditional sense. His music is fractured and messy, the sonic equivalent of pointillistic visual art. When you analyze the nuts and bolts up close, Longstreth’s sonic experiments look like random, disconnected colors. ...

Guardian Alien's debut album, See the World Given to a One Love Entity, released this month on Thrill Jockey, is a gigantic effort, one long 40-minute composition featuring hyperkinetic drumming, synthesizer, guitars, incantatory vocals, bass, and shahi baaja, a kind ...

The early Cannibal Corpse catalog—songs like “Bloody Chunks” and “Skull Full of Maggots”—throbs with the same juvenile prurience that animates Evil Dead II and classic EC Comics. The best Cannibal Corpse songs are an unholy commingling of genuine dread, sonic ...