Great new music, big names today. I’ll give a partial rundown, and then you guys tell me what you found, as usual….let’s go! Animal Collective, Fall Be Kind – Is it incumbent upon me by an obscure Law of Hackery to observe “The Fall is certainly being kind to Animal Collective lovers!” ? Fall or [...]

Once again, the folks at the Tompkins Square label have decided to offer a healthy discount to eMusic subscribers the week of Thanksgiving. How healthy, you ask? How does free strike you? Every day, starting today, a new Tompkins Square title will be offered free of charge. The schedule is below! Nov 24: Nick Jonah [...]

I’m the kind of listener who gets stuck on songs and moods. I find one mood I like and suddenly it starts appearing everywhere before me, echoes of the ideas ubiquitous. Right now two songs dominate my consciousness, both precious, contained, and beaten down by life. One is “Black Lake” from the new Real Estate [...]

“Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.” The best audiobook of the decade has to be one that grabs you instantly, and with an opening sentence like that, you might be able to see why The Blind Assassin claimed the top prize. Margaret Atwood’s novel is a [...]

Our best of the decade concludes today in the US! Here’s my essay on our #1 pick: On Is This It, the exhaustion arrives before the party. We open on young Julian, bleary-eyed, fashionably disaffected and soggy with alcohol, following a leggy brunette to her 3rd story walkup, collapsing on her couch and sighing, “Can’t [...]

As our eMusic Best of the Decade Albums list winds to a close (you’ll have to wait till Monday for the big Top Ten), we wanted to make sure that no one missed the wonderful essays we commissioned for our eMusic Yearbook. Each writer tackles a specific year, and each essay finds a novel and [...]

(Tinariwen; photo by Dennis Stempler) We’re more than halfway done with our Best of the Decade countdown now, and starting to hit the big names. Here’s where the rubber meets the road, where we move past minor personal faves and into the game-changers (which leads me to the following confession: I’m responsible for the R. [...]

Via Evan Abramson MASSIVE day. Let’s jump in headfirst: Paul McCartney, Good Evening New York City – A new live album from Macca taken from his series of Citi Field shows last summer, right before his ’09 tour. Maybe saying this reveals more about my expectations in 2009 for a Paul McCartney live album, but [...]

So I have to be honest: assembling our Best of the Decade list was incredibly intimidating. Best of each year? No problem. The scope is smaller, we all have a fair idea of which records should be included, and the squabbles about placement are more fun, more relaxed. But Best of the Decade? Man oh [...]

You know who’s a good rapper? Rakim. #Uncontroversialopinions Oh, wait, this isn’t Twitter. Whoops! Sometimes I forget that some thoughts require more than 150 or so keystrokes to communicate. That one, however, doesn’t really need anything further; Rakim is, well, he’s Rakim. In advance of his latest album, The Seventh Seal, which hits eMusic on [...]

Pretty light day today. But that doesn’t mean that what’s here isn’t fascinating/weird/awesome/etc. Let’s get to it: Omar Rodriguez Lopez, Xenophanes – Omar from At the Drive-In and The Mars Volta has a new project. You might want to sit down for this: it’s a CONCEPT ALBUM. I kid. The Mars Volta ain’t my cup [...]

(photo by mehan) There were two bands working to establish their reputations at New York’s Bowery Ballroom Friday night. The first, and more prominent, was San Francisco’s Girls, about whom it’s probably best for me to let Sean’s excellent Sound of the City piece do the talking. The other band was the New Jersey group [...]

It takes a brave man to be a guinea pig. But somehow AJ Jacobs has made a career out of it. Jacobs has detailed his attempts to read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica cover-to-cover (The Know-It-All), to literally follow every rule of the Bible (The Year of Living Biblically) and in his latest book, The Guinea [...]

Something hit the site last week that makes me feel warm and cold and excited and terrible. Phil Spector’s magical, perfect A Christmas Gift For You is the archetypal po-mo holiday album; one that is both reverent to the past and interpretive in a way that blasts apart the old structure. Spector, the creator of [...]

(photo by grazi badke) A crazy cross-section of titles today — the solo record from Strokes frontman Julian Casablancas, neo-goth from Cold Cave, and the Jason Molina back catalog on sale. Let’s get to it! Julian Casablancas, Phrazes for the Young: Ceci n’est pas un Julian! Solo record from main Stroke skews surprisingly synthy, but [...]