CULTURE
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MUSIC
Usher - Raymond v Raymond
By Ross Green | April 1, 2010Raymond v Raymond is an album filled with tracks that fail to show authentic emotion.
Raymond v Raymond is an album filled with tracks that fail to show authentic emotion.
To be sure, the second outing from She & Him is insubstantial music, but it is, above all, enjoyable.
Like Chris Brown and any number of precocious pop idols before him, Bieber is a child existing in pop music. But pop is a genre of topics on which the 16-year-old Canadian cannot be an expert.
The album is fun and playful, but at times Goldfrapp meanders without focus, resulting in music that bores rather than excites.
New Jersey indie poppers Real Estate’s eponymous debut was the sunset on the wave-washed musical summer of 2009. In anticipation of their Sunday show with Woods at the Duke Coffeehouse, Jake...
For most graduate students, a doctoral thesis has a straightforward, if daunting, form—a few hundred thousand words set down in a Microsoft Word document. But for Thom Limbert, the parameters were...
After the disappointing 2007 release of Living with the Living, it’s nice to see power-pop auteurs Ted Leo and the Pharmacists back on form with The Brutalist Bricks.
There’s enough shiny packaging to make nº 3 worthwhile, but it fails to recreate the ethereal heights of its predecessor.
Danger Mouse and James Mercer's debut settles for a quiet, almost complacent mediation between their two styles.
Gorillaz's latest release, Plastic Beach, is simultaneously their poppiest work and yet their most inaccessible.
Nee Patrick Douthit of Winston-Salem, N.C., 9th Wonder has been a mainstay of the Triangle hip-hop scene since the early part of the decade, when his original group Little Brother released debut...
Barbie just got another little sister. Europop Vicky is one sassy chick that knows how to sing.
You get the sense that a more discerning edit may have made a classic out of Have One On Me, but the relentless excess dooms it to unevenness.
Dear God, I Hate Myself is not an album for everyone. Xiu Xiu seems almost deliberately alienating, making music that is disquieting and claustrophobic.
Durham transplant Jamie Stewart released his eighth studio album under the Xiu Xiu name, Dear God, I Hate Myself, Tuesday. Recess' Jonathan Wall caught up with the former Bay Area denizen before...
In the early 1970s, Mapfumo and his band the Blacks Unlimited solidified an afro-pop style that they called “chimeranga”—the Shona word for struggle. His rich, polyrhythmic tunes drew on both...
This Thursday in Reynolds Theater, Andy Warhol’s spirit will be channeled through the modern rock of Dean & Britta, performing music to accompany a showing of the artist’s “Screen Tests.”
Gorilla Manor, the first full-length release from Los Angeles quintet Local Natives, sounds like the work of a much more accomplished band, well-formed and generally agreeable.
One Night Stand is Hot Chip’s way of declaring, “We are consistent!” With nary an unlistenable song, look for this record on 2010 best-of lists come December.
Odd Blood's aesthetic clearly diverges from All Hour Cymbals, and Yeasayer executes it with aplomb.