Six Degrees of The Flying Burrito Bros. The Gilded Palace of Sin & Burritos By Michaelangelo Matos The first two albums Gram Parsons and Chris Hillman made together as leaders of the Flying Burrito Brothers — the band continued after Parsons’ departure following 1970′s Burrito Deluxe — basically set the template for a couple of [...]

So, at this point, we probably don’t need to reiterate just how much we loved the last Beach House record. What’s most surprising to me right now is that the group is still touring in support of it. That seems to me to require a supernatural degree of patience. This has to be their 590,000th [...]

Hey guys! So things are still a little crazy as we’re settling into our new digs, but in the meantime, you can watch the bizarre and kind of hilarious video for La Sera’s “Devil Heart Grow Gold” from her just-released full-length!

(photo by this guy) Metal makes strange bedfellows. About the only thing the bands that shared the stage at the Blender Theater at Gramercy Saturday night for the Finnish Metal Tour had in common was their homeland. While all of them play music that could broadly be described as “metal,” these days, that’s about as [...]

For a while, it was getting awfully lonely being a Roots fan. The onetime critical darlings seemed to be on the outs with everyone: with hip-hop fans bored with the increasingly adventurous sonics of the group’s (in my opinion, excellent and underrated) Game Theory and Rising Down and with critics who had turned their attention [...]

Because I’m cranky and lack imagination, there’s nothing I enjoy doing more than bitching about the weather. “What the fk is up with the weather?” I say. Or, “This weather has got to stop.” Or, “Seriously, what’s up with the weather?” You know the one thing I don’t say? “Cold enough for ya?” Because, come [...]

The last few years have been particularly good to Afrobeat. Great labels like Soundway, Analog Africa and VampiSoul have brought forth heretofore undiscovered classics of African music, blogs like Voodoo Funk have offered deep cuts for true diggers, and the excellent Fela Kuti musical introduced the genre’s creator to a mainstream audience. In April, Kuti’s [...]

If you’re a music enthusiast, your life is lived beneath an avalanche of records. The internet has accelerated that deluge: I consume more albums and singles on a weekly basis now than I used to as a teenager in a month. And while it may be crazy-making, it’s also a lot of fun. There’s nothing [...]

Last night, Bright Eyes turned up on Letterman to play the song “Jejune Stars” from their, shall we say, “polarizing” new record, The People’s Key, the title of which always reminds me of one of my favorite Kathleen Edwards songs. But I digress! A few things: 1. The packaging for the vinyl looks pretty sick, [...]

Hey Guys! Just a quick note: the blog may be quieter than usual over the next day or so. eMusic is moving offices downtown (THANK GOD), rescuing us at last from midtown Manhattan hell. Consequently! Things are in boxes and it’s mildly chaotic, and we may not be as active here over the course of [...]

Photo courtesy of The Royal Scourge photo tumblr Heads up on this one, guys — new sale! For a limited time, eMusic is helping you fill out your collection, at a discount, with a new program we’re calling The Essentials. Now, for $4.99, you can get these classic, must-have albums, from iconic artists like Bruce [...]

First things first: there is no one in the Brooklyn-by-way-of-Denton, TX group Fergus & Geronimo named either Fergus or Geronimo. Those names have been purloined from a mid ’90s Irish film called War of the Buttons in which a group of young boys form “gangs,” go into battle naked and steal vanquished enemies’ buttons and [...]

Marc Bolan’s musical career began as Tyrannosaurus Rex, a moniker under which he created a handful of whimsical folk records in the late 1960s, attracting influential fans and collaborators such as Tony Visconti and John Peel. With a new decade came a new sound and a shortened band name: 1970′s T. Rex introduced Bolan’s glam [...]

Hey, remember Man/Miracle? Their eMusic Selects release The Shape of Things was hyperactive and fantastic, one great big wound-up ball of energy that gave and gave and gave. Its songs bounced around like charged-up molecules, frantic and double-time. I remember seeing them at our South by Southwest showcase last year and not being able to [...]

Are you excited for this yet? In less than a week, Lykke Li will release her second record, Wounded Rhymes, an album whose early tracks were both more percussive and more diverse than those on its predecessor. That last record was called Youth Novels, but the first song here — a scuzzy, keyboard-driven bruiser that [...]

One of the great upsides is not only getting the chance to listen to an avalanche of new bands, but also to listen to bands they love. Case in point: Bobby Boomerange — aka Dan Whitford from eMusic chart-wreckers Cut Copy paid a visit to the noted Melbourne radio show Noise In My Head to [...]

On April 12, Minneapolis hip-hop group Atmosphere return with their 6th album, The Family Sign. It’s been a full three years since When Life Gives You Lemons, but the group’s profile has only increased (I saw them play a jaw-dropping set at Lollapalooza in 2009 that filled a field with fans yelling along to every [...]

Let’s just close out the day with this, because it happened and it’s awesome. I watched this over the weekend and became super nostalgic, not only because it’s Bob Mould and Lou Barlow performing “Magnet’s Coil” acoustic on MTV (!) but because of how amateurish and awesomely unrehearsed it is. I can’t imagine this being [...]

On Saturday night, Breathe Owl Breathe left me in a puddle on the floor of Manhattan’s Highline Ballroom. I’ve been obsessing over their latest release, Magic Central, since it came out last year, but this was my first time seeing them live. Despite it being an early-evening opening set that lasted only about half an [...]

You may remember Peter Bjorn & John from that whistling song that was fun for a few months but then started getting played at weddings and family barbecues and lost its luster via jackhammering repetition (see also). At the end of the day, maybe we didn’t care about the young folks after all. Well! Here [...]