Stere­o­lab’s per­for­mance Mon­day night proved that the lega­cy of dreamy, intel­li­gent and polit­i­cal music dies with them. I can think of few oth­er artists that com­bine lounge sen­si­bil­i­ties with shoegaze noise in ways that so eas­i­ly lend them­selves as new sound­track mate­r­i­al for Bertoluc­ci’s The Con­formist. If this tour and com­pi­la­tion prove their swan song,…

Mass hys­te­ri­a’s just the fash­ion. Let’s get togeth­er to cel­e­brate soon. The New York Times reports today: Plac­ards post­ed by sol­diers at the deten­tion area advised, “NO BLOOD, NO FOUL.” The slo­gan, as one Defense Depart­ment offi­cial explained, reflect­ed an adage adopt­ed by Task Force 6–26: “If you don’t make them bleed, they can’t pros­e­cute…

When Pave­ment broke up, it was imme­di­ate­ly clear that lead singer and song­writer Stephen Malk­mus was about to embark on a jour­ney that was as much ped­a­gog­i­cal as it was cre­ative. Long viewed as some­thing of a prophet to indie rock­’s faith­ful, it came as no sur­prise that as he fell into the Anglo-Amer­i­can garage,…

Ser­e­na-Maneesh got a fog­gy notion. As the late reviews begin to pour in, it’s fair to say that there’s more to this band than Nor­we­gian charm and p.r. smoke and mir­rors. Try­ing to ascer­tain their den­si­ty is anoth­er mat­ter entire­ly, but between the youth­ful bliss of the Fixxa­tions E.P. and their new self-titled record, some­thing…

Last Thurs­day night was long and wavy. Neo-psych — call it freak­folk, call it noise, call it a shoegaze revival — is plentiful…and cova­lent. Now Espers is tour­ing with Stere­o­lab, Dun­gen remix­es Mia Doi Todd and it’s clear that some­thing’s hap­pen­ing. Whether or not this is just a pass­ing trend in a sub­cul­tur­al ghet­to remains…