Bob Dylan doesn’t care if you like him. It’s the same now as it was in 1963. Dylan is a songwriter, and when he’s performing on stage, he lets his songs do all the talking. He’ll introduce his band, and that’s all he needs you to know. Courtney Love is not Bob Dylan. For all her bravado, ...

Over the years, I’ve liked to consider myself a connoisseur of soundtracks. From the John Hughes compilations of my youth, to recent stellar collections for such movies as Scott Pilgrim vs. the World or (500) Days of Summer, it’s fairly easy to find great soundtracks filled by ...

The TV theme song as we once knew it is something of an endangered species these days. Ever since a quick bass line introduced the first episode of Seinfeld, original themes with lyrics that explained the show's premise started sounding dated. Nowadays most shows just use a bit of ...

Next weekend, a couple dozen classic indie rock bands are gathering in Las Vegas to play a birthday celebration for legendary underground label Matador Records. Among the names scheduled to appear are Superchunk, Guitar Wolf, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, Fucked Up, ...

Though it was Nirvana's efforts that made it able for grunge-and by extension all alternative/fringe culture-to break into the mainstream, I've always found it more than a little amusing that such a break was made possible by Nirvana's least-grunge album. For all of Nevermind's screaming, ...

Looking back just a few short months at the beginning of our For the Record series, a lot has evolved since then. Our methods remain the same: a panel of writers listens to a series of records that we previously hadn’t heard, and share those experiences and first impressions in writing. What has ...

A rose by any other name would smell just as sweet, right? Well, sometimes it has to. In the case of some albums, a secondary name is necessary because it’s either too long to keep repeating, unpronounceable, or a bit too ambiguous for anyone to know what you’re talking about. Here are ten albums ...

Summer is generally considered a heavy season for singles, and rightfully so. When the weather’s hot and friends start hosting cookouts, nobody really wants to put on . But 2010 has shown that some of the best singles (or what, for all intents and purposes, we’d ...

This week, UK gloom-pop outfit and Treble favorites The xx were honored with the annual Mercury Prize, an award given to British artists who released the best album of the year, as determined by a panel of industry judges. However, in its 19th year, the music prize has racked up a fairly long and ...