Use the fields below to perform an advanced search of The Chronicle's archives. This will return articles, images, and multimedia relevant to your query. You can also try a Basic search
76 items found for your search. If no results were found please broaden your search.
Music writing can be illuminating and incisive, or it can be obnoxious and pretentiously in-jokey, or it can just be dumb. But it’s usually pretty self-serious: it exists because someone privileged their own opinion enough to write it down and share with others. It is rarely humorous, except in a second-order, wow-Ian-Cohen-is-a-douche sort of way.
Music writing can be illuminating and incisive, or it can be obnoxious and pretentiously in-jokey, or it can just be dumb. But it’s usually pretty self-serious: it exists because someone privileged their own opinion enough to write it down and share with others. It is rarely humorous, except in a second-order, wow-Ian-Cohen-is-a-douche sort of way.
Recess doesn’t publish on Thanksgiving. You’ll have to make do without us on that most indulgently lazy holiday, which, I know, is a little like (complete simile with something else inessential to the enjoyment of a holiday). Because I won’t get to express my gratitude in writing next Thursday, and because I feel so overstuffed with thanks (like being overdosed on confidence, or eating so much turkey that you pass out at the table, which is another thing Drizzy might do), I’ve started giving some out a week early this year. Not only is it the right thing to do, it’s a way for me to restrain myself from making too-soon Jerry Sandusky jokes. Or touching little boys’ thighs. Or both. Onwards:
For whatever else it may be, Take Care is most of all a contrivance. It’s a remarkably representative reflection, at one particular moment in the man’s contrived second career, of an Aubrey Drake Graham of Toronto, Ontario, who once starred in a teen soap opera called Degrassi: The Next Generation.
Florence + The Machine have something to prove, and they won’t be denied. As a document celebrating the sheer power of its subject, Ceremonials isn’t unlike a five-minute YouTube clip of Blake Griffin dunking over Korean automobiles—first impressive, and then still kind of impressive, and now, redundant to the point of exhaustion.
The Throne performed at Greensboro Coliseum last Sunday, and I wasn’t there to see them.
The Throne performed at Greensboro Coliseum last Sunday, and I wasn’t there to see them.
What a weird record this is.
I didn’t go to Countdown to Craziness, so I wasn’t privy to this information until a moment ago. But apparently the event showcased something called “Duke Worldwide,” which is a thing like a music video. I say it is like a music video because I want to emphasize that it is not actually a music video. It is a compilation of snippets of interviews with Duke basketball players, time-stretched and rearranged over one of those truly terrible electro beats to loosely resemble a genre called “rap” or “hip-hop.” For example: “Everything we do is first class”—the attribution is uncertain, but again, these are direct quotes from basketball players— is made to rhyme with “We really make a statement on the glass.” Tell me I’m wrong: that s**t is fire.
Let’s talk for a minute about Occupy Wall Street.
Alexi Murdoch’s headlining set next Saturday at Reynolds Theater will mark a return to familiar ground for the acoustic troubadour.
2011 has been a huge year for Philadelphia rockers the War on Drugs. In March, former bandmate and longtime associate Kurt Vile released Smoke Ring For My Halo to a chorus of praise; three months later, the band followed his lead with a breakout album of their own, Slave Ambient, a brilliant fusion of classic rock songwriting and effects-laden sonic atmospheres. The band’s tour will take them to Raleigh next Tuesday, Oct. 11 for a concert at King’s Barcade; Recess caught up with frontman and songwriter Adam Granduciel for a conversation about the making of Slave Ambient, listening to the Field, and the popular misconceptions of his relationship with Vile.
Have you heard Lil Wayne recently?
I got nothing this week. So: an apropos-of-nothing, RapGenius-style breakdown of Drake’s guest verse on the Weeknd’s “The Zone.”
A couple weeks ago, I was involved in a semi-serious car accident and my less-than-trusty Honda Civic was deemed, in claims adjustor parlance, a “total loss.” Wrecks like this can be traumatic events for the people involved, but not so in my case: I wasn’t injured, the collision was the other driver’s fault and I didn’t have any sort of emotional attachment to my totaled vehicle. I was in a rental car the next day and bought a new car two weeks later: case closed, for all practical, transportation-related purposes.
If you’re reading this, and you don’t have a ticket to Hopscotch Music Festival this weekend, it’s probably too late. Sure, there are probably a few passes still out there to see the Flaming Lips or Drive-By Truckers. But as all the art school Brooklynites in their little jackets know, going to a festival to see the headliners is about the least relevant thing you can do.
When “How Deep Is Your Love?” dropped earlier this summer, you would have been forgiven for prematurely penciling In the Grace of Your Love into the 2011 year-end lists. An undeniable Chicago house banger, with a high-tension hook to match its minor-key piano loop, the track appeared to signal a potent new iteration of the Rapture: steelier, more mature, less reliant on well-worn dance-punk tropes. Their five-year hiatus looked like the perfect tonic, and their reemergence seemed well-timed to capitalize on the ascension of dance music in the indie realm.
Do you perceive a relative lack of quality among today’s artists when measuring them against the Eagles, or even Chuck Berry? Have the sense that you’re part of a generation robbed of the chance to see some of the the “best of all time” by a greedy, monolithic music industry myopic enough to actually discourage innovation? Am I deliberately setting up a straw man right now?
As recently as two years ago, the second weekend in September didn’t hold any particular significance to Raleigh-Durham music fans.
This was supposed to be a rant.
