Blog: PopMatters

Brooklyn electro-dancers Tayisha Busay offer up a perfect new video for Valentine's Day, "Heartmeat, Lovemuscle". Tayisha Busay is an electro-dance band known for their energetic live performances and sparkle-heavy, bouncy, music videos. The band, comprised of Tessa G, Ariel Sims and Brandon LalaVek, is based in Brooklyn. Some of Tayisha Busay's past popular tunes include such colorful titles as "WTF You Doin in My Mouth" and "Soul Power". This highly unique band has their own sound and their own style, listing among their influences "Classy meets trashy, dancing like you...

Counterbalance is a concept by which we measure the most Acclaimed Music of all time. This week, number 68 -- the first time an ex-Beatle makes the Great List. Klinger: I've generally considered John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band to be an album that is more respected than liked. It has a built-in reputation as the by-product of Lennon's "Primal Scream" phase, a brief time in which he employed the therapies of Dr. Arthur Janov and took to shrieking his troubles away. All of this baggage caused me to think of John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band as pure catharsis, an extended rant [...]

They've conquered the world by singing in French, pretending to rap, and releasing remix albums that are almost as acclaimed as their regular ones. Welcome to the topsy-turvy world of Yelle, where fashion, touring, and a love of Mike Meyers all collide ... French pop band Yelle (an acronym for "Enjoy Your Life") burst into the music scene a few years ago with their infectious beats and a curious combination of street style and a very Gallic sense of humor. One of their first mainstream singles, "Je Veux Te Voir", contained the lyrics "Je veux te voir/Dans un film [...]

From the artwork to that irritating 'z' in the EP's title, Teen Jamz smacks of ironic distance. From the artwork to that irritating 'z' in the EP's title, Teen Jamz smacks of ironic distance. The glam-rock-via-new-wave that Gross Magic's Sam McGarrigle claims as his own on his new EP feels more like it was manufactured to fill a niche than created out of necessity. That's not to say McGarrigle can't write a solid pop song. "Sweetest Touch", with its crunching guitar riff, is as good as this EP gets, and it's the...

The most popular metal band in America makes the most unnecessary blunders to spoil what is otherwise a pretty good third album. There is a very important reason why Five Finger Death Punch has essentially become the face of metal in America. In many ways, their outward appearance personifies every stereotype that pop culture makes about the modern-day metal listener, just as much as their music matches the preconceptions made about metal by most non-metal listeners. The group's first two albums, The Way of the Fist and War Is the Answer, were chock-full of meaty riffs, wild...

A compilation that shows that Bob Seger was at times a good artist, but also shows why he was never really a great one. A funny thing happens when you listen to both discs of Bob Seger's new greatest hits anthology: There doesn't seem to be any difference between songs recorded decades apart. Indeed, the whole thing plays like a double album recorded all at once, apart from some minor differences in production. That's an indication of just how consistent Seger's music has been through the years: he's never really altered his style or technique all that much. You...

Lewis & Texas Fire managed to create an album that is full of soul, and deep rooted in the blues - whether or not purists agree. Picture yourself in a dark basement bar, sitting at a small round table, only enough room for your drink and your date's. Her purse is dangling loosely from her seatback while the ice melts into your whisky and cigarette smoke drifts into the air. Now turn on The Real Deal. Feels right, doesn't it? "Music could be so joyful without going to hell!" Sharon Lewis declares in the liner notes to her debut [...]

Finally, a worthy compilation - and appreciation - of the greatest stand-up comedian of the '90s. There's a notion that Bill Hicks was a miserable cynic who hated the human race and thought that everything on the planet was an evil conspiracy. And there's truth and falseness in that statement. A cynic, yes. But despite his oft-quoted bit about humans being "a virus with shoes", he wasn't actually that nihilistic on the whole. Behind all the skepticism and vitriol, there was an undeniable excitement to his role of what his friend...

Experiments such as these can result in disaster when executed by lesser musicians, but musical genius abounds on this release. It is best to think of free-jazz as conversations. These conversations can run the gamut, from the incomprehensible to the sublime. In the case of Pitch, Rhythm, and Consciousness the results are sublime. This inward reflection on time and space drives the listener to consider time as cyclical. This talented New York trio is comprised of Tony Jones on tenor saxophone, violinist Charles Burnham, and drummer Kenny Wollesen. Oakland, CA native Tony Jones steers many...

Failure is ultimately an album you can put your arms around and give a great big hug to, and - maybe, just maybe - a big, wet sopping kiss. The third album from Chicago's Unicycle Loves You appropriately drops on Valentine's Day 2012. And there's a fair deal to love about this trio's latest, the ironically-titled Failure. While the band earns comparisons to the likes of Guided by Voices - which I don't see, unless titling your songs "Wow Wave Cinema" and "Master Medical Driveway" taps into the same stream-of-consciousness whimsy of Robert Pollard - what Unicycle Loves [...]

• Unicycle Loves You - Wow Wave Cinema

For those looking for something as strong as industrial-strength floor wax to serve as a dessert topping, this EP will handily do the trick. An extended play ultimately has a multitude of uses. It can be a simple single padded with bonus tracks or B-sides that a band or an artist wants to toss out as a sort of odds-and-sods release for die-hard fans. Or it can be an entity in its own right, a tight package of material that has a definite start and end, and is more of a mini-album - think Sugar's Beaster as a good...

Scottish brooders turn the shoegaze down, invest in some new technology, and make a record that pushes the limits of their band's well-honed sound. It's good to try new things. Right? We're all onboard with that advice. Order the octopus. Go to the matinee at that Bollywood theater. Explore a new neighborhood on your bike. That sort of stuff. And, if you're a band, try some new instruments in the studio. Usually these will be synths and drum machines. Check them out. Who knows what could happen? Actually, what usually happens is a critic will end up reviewing your...

Twenty years (or so) in, the seminal techno act releases two very different compilations. Both succeed on their own terms. Not everybody is around for 20 years or more, and not everybody who makes it that far deserves much of a commemoration. But questions of longevity aside (and continued productivity -- 2010's Barking continued Underworld's strong third act, and between soundtrack work and being the musical directors for the London Olympics, Karl Hyde and Rick Smith show no signs of slowing down), Underworld are justly a big deal. For years they've made excellent, emotionally clued-in,...

Regardless how history comes to look Nick Cave's <ithe Death of Bunny Munro , in the context of Cave's career, it stands alone as the purest distillation of his artistry -- a poetic novel with Cave's inimitable brand of the grotesque, absurd and often comic nature of humanity. With the publication of The Death of Bunny Munro in the spring of 2009, Australian songwriter, author, and modern-day renaissance man Nick Cave unleashed on his public perhaps one of the most deviant, despicable protagonists in the entirety of modern literature. Bunny Munro -- drug abusing, chain-smoking, sex-obsessed lothario whose spree [...]

"What was it like coming back to America after fighting in Vietnam?" asks an off-screen narrator. A 22-year-old black man nods and begins to talk, his weary expression suggesting this is a question he's prepared to answer, but one he dreads. "It's almost the same as when I left, " he begins. "I say this because when a man goes to fight for his country and then comes back over here and almost have to...

Los Angeles Times (MCT) -- LONG BEACH, Calif. - In its heyday, World Famous VIP Records in Long Beach had a full-time disc jockey playing music for customers, and clerks learned their clients' tastes so well they knew what to put on as soon as customers walked in the store. Over the years, VIP became a family-owned chain, with 14 locations across Los Angeles County, the Long Beach store eventually emerging as the flagship. Now owned by Kelvin Anderson, VIP...

Unlike potboiler musicians with kiss-off egos, the Shadow proves that Blank Generation music was open-ended and robust, a welcome home to punk brands of all stripes. After the initial sweeping vengeance of punk took hold after 1977, a sweeping platform of New Music strode in, re-landscaping pop music. In that heady era, all things converged, from Talking Heads and the Records to Joe Jackson and Ultravox. That's the genre I sense when listening Texas-based the Shadow, who melds punk's knack for the inchoate and off-kilter with a savvy sense of trad-rock hooks and pop-a-delic fare. To be sure, for [...]

This is not your basic club single. It doesn't ask you to like it. Released on vinyl in early 2012 as the b-side to a DJ Hidden/Broken Note collaboration, "Obey" sees Ad Noiseam producers Niveau Zero and Balkansky come together for one brief, dirty moment. While the North American mainstream struggles with the cycle of dubstep hype and backlash, this track falls not into its spiral. Rather, "Obey" huffs and puffs and blows down the house with its uncompromising bass and meticulous production. This is not your basic club...