Aside from having an amazing band name, Fear of Men released one of my favorite albums of 2014 in their full-length debut, Loom. The band recently announced its follow-up, Fall Forever, which is scheduled for U.S. release on 6/3. Happily, the album's first single, "Island," picks up exactly where Loom left off two years ago. Thrashing its way to the surface of a...

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I'm hoping to write more about Esperanza Spalding's excellent new album, Emily's D+Evolution, in a post I have planned for next month. But as soon as I finished watching Spalding and her band's live performance of the project, I knew I had to share it immediately. Emily's D+Evolution is a concept album, of sorts: a meticulous yet passionate fusion of jazz with pop...

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Listen, my musical taste wasn't particularly refined in the 1990s. Probably because I was a child. In 1999, I was ten years old, my favorite musician was Shania Twain, and I was on the verge of a major pop breakthrough in the form of my worryingly intense *NSYNC fandom. Fast forward five or six years, though, and I grew hungry for something more...

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Yesterday, I put a link to my latest post up on Tumblr, as I usually do, and one of my followers shared it on Twitter (where my presence is woefully nonexistent), which ended up being seen by Zac Pennington, who had a beautiful response that I'm sharing here for posterity's sake and, yes, to boost my own ego a bit. Anyway, less than...

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Parenthetical Girls' most recent lineup (L-R): Amber W. Smith, Zac Pennington, Paul Alcott  Parenthetical Girls is an experimental pop band formed in Everett, WA in 2003 by relative non-musician Zac Pennington. Over a career spanning more than ten years, Pennington has impressively expanded his musical breadth, in large part thanks to the talents of a rotating cast of supporting musicians, marrying his heavily...

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Yesterday, singer-songwriters Neko Case, k.d. lang, and Laura Viers announced a collaborative project, aptly titled case/lang/viers. I have to admit that my interest lies mostly in Case's participation, since I've been a fan of hers for years. That's not to discount the talent of the other two ladies, of course, but I have to admit that my excitement for the collaboration increased exponentially...

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