In these days of digital downloads and industry turmoil it is so easy to feel disconnected emotionally from the hype and release of any body of recorded music. So imagine my surprise and delight when I was sent into a fanatic FURY upon noticing what had been tagged in two normally unexciting fields of [...]

A relatively quiet day for New Arrivals on eMusic, but the few we do have are noteworthy. Side note: Todd was supposed to write this post, but he’s been camped out since 10am in front of the Best Buy across the street for a Janet Jackson meet & greet (That’s him with the brown [...]

Well, now that Girl Talk has opened up the floodgates for wanton, promiscuous and insanely danceable sound collage that samples from all over the pop spectrum, the next logical step is to specialize. Sure enough, someone from Acton, England, going by the name of Bullion Ness has constructed really brilliant [...]

Sixteen SEVENTEEN songs, all of them great, and all of them totally free. That’s right, it’s time for the second annual Pitchfork Music Festival Sampler. Tracks by Dan Deacon, Professor Murder, Of Montreal, Menomena, William Parker, Grizzly Bear and on and on. All songs were chosen by Pitchfork and were subsequently sequenced by us (which [...]

The other day I was talking with a classical music fan and I asked if he downloaded music. No, classical music, with its vast dynamic range, didn’t go well with walking down noisy city streets or riding the subway. He preferred to listen to music at home, and didn’t have an MP3 player hooked up [...]

Photo by Johnny Blood
Here are the nine best albums to hit eMusic this week, with an embedded YouTube clip for almost all of them. Have at it.

If you’re really into learning about the whos, whats, whys, whens, etc. about classic albums, there’s no better place to start than the 33 1/3 book series that is put out by Continuum. They’ve put out nearly 40 volumes so far and they’ve just announced another batch of titles that will be written over the [...]

I’ve been nigh-on obsessed the past few days with Kathy Diamond. Set to be released in April, her debut album is a collection of spectral slo-mo disco tunes flecked with touches of dub by her producer, the incomparable Maurice Fulton.

On my iPod, stereo and mind all this week and last are three songs, each of them utterly perfect and awaiting a download. They come from the Rakes, Medicine Head and the Gun Club.

Most of today I’ve been listening to Boyhood, the debut album from Wichita trio Paper Airplanes, which drops March 20. It’s a huge, epic record, a Big Statement debut that has me ecstatic. The album’s first single, “The Fences” (download it from Spin.com here), lands somewhere in the vicinity of My Chemical Romance and Bright [...]

Mark March 12 in your calendar, folks, because it’s one of the best days for new additions to the site we’ve had in recent memory.

Indeed, it is finally Arcade Fire Day, but the long tail is big effect, with new albums from Amon Tobin, Barenaked Ladies, RJD2 and many others.

It’s only in the past year that I’ve really begun to dig into world music. For a long time, I admired it from afar like a museum piece, nodding appreciatively at the names that every “cultured” critic feted and filing the entire thing away as “something to be listened to when I’m ready to admit [...]

An African guitar masterpiece, modernist classical, Brazilian jazz, post-punk and the Carter Family herald the first day of March.

Today on Pitchfork, the venerable Andy Battaglia called Brazilian electronic musician Gui Boratto’s new album Chromophobia “one of the three or four best artist-albums to bear the Kompakt stamp,” Kompakt being the esteemed Cologne microhouse label. As he always is, Battaglia is very, very right. It’s a wonderful record, albeit one unavailable on eMusic. Fortunately [...]

Garage rock, dub-step, house music and hardcore in today’s haul.

New release Tuesday! Does this still have the same ring to it in the digital age? At eMusic, we hope so. There’s plenty to dig into, so let’s get right to it…

Last week Stereogum posted a new Snowden remix (”Between the Rent,” by Captain Crunk), as well as a glitchy cover of Fleetwood Mac’s excellent “Dreams.”

In 2000, Doghouse Records released Encapsulated, a tribute album of sorts to the Kentucky band Metroschifter. For Encapsulated, Metroschifter main man Scott Richter sent out his recordings to some of his favorite bands with the hopes that they would cover them in their own particular style. It’s the sort of endeavor for which the term [...]

I had the distinct kinda pleasure to see Explosions in the Sky the other night. I say kinda because they’re one of those weird bands that I can never decide if I really like that much or not. If my (often) frightening last.fm stats are any indication, I love the group. And if you’d take [...]