It’s no great revelation that the American suburb, that realm of domesticity created by the white flight of the 1950s and 60s, can be a dehumanizing place filled with tedium and pain behind a facade of a happy middle-class lifestyle. In fact, the topic has been something of a pet point of reflection in pop culture for couple decades at least, from Mad Men to Revolutionary Road to The Ice Storm and American Beauty.
And so it’s inevitable that some commentators will scoff at The Arcade Fire’s third full-length album, The …

This week, since there weren’t really any albums coming out I felt compelled to review (none I could stream, anyway), I figured I’d take a look back at the shows I saw weekend before last at the Pitchfork Music Festival here in my newly adopted home city of Chicago.
FRIDAY
The first set I saw on the sweltering first day of the festival, fresh from ditching work a couple hours early, was former Def Jux label head El-P, who started out a little rough — the first song, “Smithereens (Stop Crying)” was …

I’m not gonna lie. It’s my professional opinion that OutKast has been the most important, influential and beautifully brilliant act in hip-hop, and maybe even all of music, for the past dozen years or so. It’s hard for me to overstate what Big Boi and Andre 3000 have contributed to American culture in that time.
Which is my roundabout way of saying that I expect a lot from them.
Their last proper album as a duo, 2006′s soundtrack to their movie Idlewild, was a pretty colossal disappointment. It’s got some gems (“Mighty …

The Roots have never put out a bad album. Obviously, some are better than others — 1999′s Things Fall Apart is regarded as the standard-bearer and 2004′s The Tipping Point was something of a low point — but few hip-hop acts have managed The Roots’ longevity at all, let alone their stunning consistency.
Conversely, The Roots also haven’t managed to attain the crossover appeal other much less worthy hip-hop acts have managed with relative ease. How I Got Over, the band’s ninth full-length studio album, finally holds that potential in light …

I don’t know what it is, but it seems like just about every time a band takes any sort of extended absence from studio work, there’s this weight hanging over their return album. Some burden of proof the band feels like it has to live up to. Some overwhelming need to prove relevance.
That seems to be especially true for Devo, a trailblazing band releasing its first album in 20 years. Unfortunately, Mark Mothersbaugh’s group seems to have mistaken a sad adherence to cliche and cultural reference from the last five …

I was a late comer to The Black Keys. I heard stuff for years and years about how The Rubber Factory was an amazing record or some show they played was so great. Hell, I even heard their stuff in all kinds of stuff I like (in particular the first episode of Eastbound and Down).
And boy, was I wrong not to listen to them. They really are a terrific band (a two-piece at that). But I was lucky enough to finally get into them with this record, the best of …

Brooklyn noise-rock duo Sleigh Bells sure picked the right title for their debut album. Not because it’s necessarily a treat to listen to it, but in that it’s essentially the musical equivalent of the sugariest or sourest candy you can think of. At first, it’s a sensation you’re not really used to, kind of exhilarating even in its discomfort. But keep ingesting it and it’s not long before you’re as sick as you can be.
Late last year, I downloaded the Sleigh Bells tracks that took the Internet by storm and …

The summer music season arrives today with the release of a slew of new albums from big-name pop acts competing for your download or disc dollar. With all that new music on the way, I thought I’d change things up a little bit and do three shorter reviews in place of my usual single bimonthly review.
You’re welcome.
Broken Social Scene, Forgiveness Rock Record

I really wanted to like this album. I did. Broken Social Scene’s previous record, their self-titled 2005 effort, is something I still listen to now.
This album, I probably won’t …

I’m proud to say that the new record from James Murphy’s LCD Soundsystem carries on the fine tradition of the previous two.
You may have by now heard the lead single from the album, “Drunk Girls,” which I hate to inform you is the worst track on the whole thing. It’s got a perfectly danceable up-tempo beat but ends up sounding a lot more like the closing music to a 1980s college slobs vs. snobs comedy than I would prefer. On the album itself, “Drunk Girls” also has the misfortune of …

Concept albums about historical figures have always been something of a tricky proposition. Sometimes, they can turn out to be a little obtuse, to the point where longtime fans are surprised to find out that the album was based on anybody. Take Neutral Milk Hotel’s superlatively great album In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, which, believe it or not, is about Anne Frank. If I hadn’t read that in interviews and reviews in the course of my budding love affair with that record, I would have never known.