Touch

Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories was one of those moment-in-time-defining records that form the soundtrack of your life, even if you end up not playing them very often after the moment itself has passed. That’s by design, as the title suggests and songs themselves confirm. …

Too Close

There’s a very mundane reason why I’m so fixated on a roster of music that came out in the mid-2010s. 2012 was the year I finally bought a car after several years of not owning one, and I drove around listening to the radio because. …

Tonight You’re Perfect

I’ve always said that New Politics were one of the best pop-rock bands of the 2010’s, and yet I didn’t even know they were Danish. I thought they were American, because they sound like Americans, I guess. They’re from Copenhagen. Chalk another one up for …

Through the Storm

I can’t believe that there was a time, not so long ago, when it seemed like Soul music was dead and gone, a relic of the 1960’s as unrevivable as bouffant hairdos. The sexy Neo-Soul phase of the 90’s felt toothless, and more oriented towards …

Three Beauties

One of my favorite randomly found treasures, an album so obscure I have no memory of how I found it: Kabatronics by Transglobal Underground. It’s one of the weirdest thing I’ve discovered. The Transglobal Underground are actually very well regarded as a cult group, for …

This Ladder Is Ours

This is the very definition of a joyous noise, and as if it couldn’t be any more on-the-nose, the video depicts the band playing in a fierce dust storm. Of course, very few bands have a name that describes exactly what they sound like, and …

This Isn’t Control

I think that MS MR’s Secondhand Rapture is one of the most self-assured debuts in recent memory. It’s one of those records that both caught a lot of attention in the moment, and has also held up years later. I also note that MS MR …

This Is the Last Time

I’m a big fan of the year 2013, as you know. It was a year notable for flooding the radio with vanishingly light, ephemeral dreampop. You would have thought, based on the the music alone, that the human condition consists of nothing more than love-drunk …

Think of You

Listening to Ms Mr still zooms me straight back to the summer of 2013. They had at least three hit songs on the radio that year, the kind of songs that have you instantly cranking up the volume. Lizzy Plapinger’s voice cut through the noise …

Things We Lost In the Fire

Like I mentioned a few days ago, I don’t know why I still listen to every new Bastille album that comes out. There are four of them now, and I can’t even say that I loved the first one. But I guess I’m expecting that …