A Bay Area music / urban planning blog
All things music-related
What can one say about 2020 other than, “Good riddance”? I can think of one thing: There was some damn good music released this year. Is it because 2020 was a particularly fruitful year, with talented artists who had nothing else to do but write and record new music?
On the brights side, one of the nice things about being cooped up with your household and no one else for 3/4 of the year…
This year. This fucking year. But, on the bright side, it’s half over! And surely 2021 couldn’t be any worse, right? RIGHT? In times like…
Fourteen of the 30 tracks below are either by a female solo artist, a band with a frontwoman, a male-female duo, someone who doesn’t subscribe to binary gender identifiers, or a Canadian indie-supergroup prominently featuring Neko Case.
I feel like I should apologize one more time for the overwhelming amount of nerdy, folky, melodic indie rock and the distinct lack of Beyonce and Frank Ocean and Kendrick Lamar compared to most best-of-the-decade lists.
If you’re going to make an Important Album in the late 2010s, you’d better wrap it in a personae or extreme vulnerability or some goof-assery,…
A lot of people were talking about building walls in 2017, but the musicians I was listening to that year were all about breaking down barriers: deconstructing genres, combining genres, giving new life to tired genres, imbuing old songs with new meaning and, in some cases, directly questioning those who would divide us.
I don’t think it’s just 20/20 hindsight that gives the impression that the music of 2016 is permeated by a sense of existential dread.
As we speed headlong into the second half of the decade, pleasant surprises abound. Among other things, for me, 2015 is proof that bands I’ve…
We all remember how 2014 was a stand-out year for boundary-pushing country artists and finely crafted, acoustic pop-folk, yeah? OK, I didn’t realize it until…