150 Best Albums of 2023

As the hottest year on record so far wound down to a holiday season portending what’s sure to be an even hotter and otherwise frightening on many fronts 2024, an article began making the rounds on what little social media I tune into wondering whether rock music is dead, over, kaput. In 2023, no less!…

Pogues Review, 1985

“They’ll take you from this place you’re in and stick you in a box. Then they’ll take you to Cloughprior and shove you in the ground, but you’ll stick your head back out and shout we’ll have another round.” –“The Sick Bed of Cuchalainn,” 1985 Probably a good idea to avoid driving through any Irish…

Reggae Tings an’ NY Times

First there’s the question of spelling. The New York Times initially couldn’t decide whether the genre was “reggae” or “reggay,” the latter of which, as is explained below, was the notation the Maytals used in 1966, on what is said to be the genre’s first legit record ever. If the newspaper’s stylebook ever codified the…

150 Best Albums of 2002

MY CRANKY COMMENTS THEN: If the Pazz & Jop album list is indeed topped by Wilco, Springsteen, and Beck¹, which I assume it will be, then 2002 will probably be first year ever that the top three albums will all have been reviewed negatively in the Voice itself (by Christian Hoard, Keith Harris, and James…

1-girl:2-boy Amerindie Trio Licks, 2003

CORDELIA’S DAD “Jane”/”Promise”/“Closing Year” Last year, in “Camile’s Not Afraid of the Barn,” these indie-rock-moonlighting Massachusetts folk festival standbys set mysterious words about beached sharks, pellet guns, Chinatown firecrackers, and the smell of dirtbikes to a riff from “Jane Says” by Jane’s Addiction. Their new three-inch CD EP leads, coincidentally, with a traditional upstate-NY ballad…

The making of ZoSo

Just realized I’ve talked on the phone to half of Led Zeppelin — Robert Plant (see Creem interview piece in my third book) struck me as a very nice guy as well. This John Paul Jones conversation was for something called The Rolling Stone 200: The Essential Rock Collection, which I assume was some kinda…

Neil Young review, 1986

Note gratuitous but arguably prescient Dinosaur Jr. plug at the end. Only time I’ve written about Neil, I think, besides three short reviews (Rust Never Sleeps, Live Rust, Re-Ac-Tor) in Stairway to Hell. If I was doing that metal book now instead of around 1990, there would conceivably be more by him (Arc‘s kind of…

Mekons review, 1986

Lester Bangs and Greil Marcus had both been on their side for years, but the Mekons didn’t really catch on with American rock critics until 1985’s Fear and Whiskey. (I have no idea how British critics felt about them, though they don’t seem to have placed on New Musical Express end-of-year lists. David Bowie did…

Folk Bands in Denial, 2008

Haven’t kept up with any of these bands since — My Americana attention span is not long. Not even sure whether Darius Rucker’s (i.e., the Artist formerly known as Hootie’s) cover of Old Crow Medicine Show’s fleshing out of Dylan’s “Wagon Wheel” made Ketch Secor a rich man. Apparently a lot of it went back…