How British is Kate Bush?

Chris Molanphy had a fascinating, typically deep-researched piece up on Slate today about Kate Bush’s four-decade road to a sizable U.S. pop hit, thanks finally to being heard on Stranger Things, one of my favorite TV shows though I’ve still yet to start the new season with “Running Up That Hill” in it. But I…

35 Best Singles of 2021

I tend to live in my own bubble, if not on my own planet, when it comes to singles these days. Well, maybe I always did (you might be saying), but at least I used to not go through entire years without writing about any of them, or really talking to anybody about them at…

Aqua and Gabba review, 1997

I’m so predictable. But aren’t you glad I don’t hate fun? L.A. Weekly, 5 December 1997

Roxette profile, 1991

Similar to when I interviewed the Pet Shop Boys for the same publication four months earlier, in that both involved highly stressful trips from Philly to a New York that was still terrifyingly foreign territory to me, except that Per Gessle was warmer than Neil Tennant and Marie Fredriksson was colder than Chris Lowe. Though…

German music Licks, 2003

RPWL, Stock Jetboys from Friesling, Germany, they started out six years ago as a Pink Floyd cover band. Their third CD still opens with a Syd Barrett song, which itself starts with rocket blastoffs, then drifts into deep space. The singer’s got the Central European softness and English-as-second-language everyday conversational tone of the guy in…

Alison Moyet review, 1985

Stepping out of my hard-rock metal-punk comfort zone, a mere year into my Village Voice (and paid rock-crit in general) career. I just came across a Barry Walters review of a subsequent Moyet album from two years later in Spin, where he touched (and expanded) on some of the same ideas I’d had: “Over here,…

German album roundup, 1996

More evidence of my alleged Teutonophilia. Though it’s not like I’m entirely positive about all these schallplatten. And why the droney early ’70s Unidentified Flying Rock which by the mid ’90s was known far and wide as Kraut-rock so irked me all of a sudden, I can’t say. L.A. Weekly, 16 August 1996

Macarena Wins 1995

Presumably for a really long time, the Minneapolis-St. Paul City Pages arts section asked critics (and maybe normal folks) around the country to write short pieces on whoever they deemed the biggest-deal Artist of the Year. I contributed at least three times, I think — the cast of My So-Called Life (or maybe just Rayanne…

Sonic Taxonomy: ’90s Eurocheese

Social networks and global economics of scale have since flattened the world –- Europe’s pop turned more soul-conscious, America’s more synth-conscious, and most everybody’s wound up occupying watered-down middle ground. But back in the ‘90s, before MySpace and iTunes (or Friendster and Napster even), continental Europe was free to be a happily clueless bubblegum island…

Daft Punk review, 1997

Doubt I really “got” the point of techno then. Might get it even less now. But I was at least a wee bit ahead of the game on these guys.