Billy Bragg Tooth & Nail (Essential) Billy Bragg has always been better at compartmentalizing than his reputation as a political songwriter might suggest. This isn’t to say his political work from the late 1970s isn’t iconic; it’s just that his songs about sex, love, romance, and marriage...

Audio Adrenaline Kings & Queens (Fair Trade Services) One thing that happens from time to time is fratricide. I don’t mean this literally. But it’s basically fact that the Ramones and Sex Pistols came along and made Robert Plant and Jimmy Page seem like dinosaurs, and we’ve all...

Earlier this month, we looked at artists’ paintings of poets, discovering homages both photo-realist and illustrative of poetic styles. Our visual-arts celebration of National Poetry Month continues with poets as artists. William Blake is the first poet who comes to mind when we’re talking...

Ellen Allien LISm (Bpitch Control) I have been reading Albert Camus’s The Plague for the fourth or fifth time. It is one of my all-time favorite books and, given my tendency to slip into a funk in the springtime, on the short-list of books I pick up when I am wallowing in the mire of depression. Let...

Throughout history, poets and painters have been hanging out together at coffee shops, bars, and salons. More than just admiring each other and relating as starving artists, they have influenced each other to experiment with new styles. Not surprisingly, poets have ended up as popular subject matter...

The Howling Hex The Best of the Howling Hex (Drag City) I take my son to kindergarten each morning in a twelve-year-old, salvage-titled CR-V that, incidentally, is missing a muffler. It is a noisy fifteen-minute drive. As if to add insult to injury, the stereo only comes out of one of the speakers. Occasionally,...

“There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens: . . . A time to weep.” ~ Ecclesiastes 3: 1, 4 From the article Mary Statue Weeps Blood on Patheos

If you were to picture the stereotype of a music industry executive sitting in his plush office plotting how to promote a smooth, catchy act who will appeal widely and inoffensively to a large swath of the properly calibrated target demographic, and then go to the opposite of whatever spectrum that is,...

Apparat Krieg und Frieden (Music for Theatre) Mute Apparat’s new album sounds like a soundtrack. And so it is, for a stage production of Krieg und Frieden, or as most English speakers know it, Tolstoy’s War and Peace. After scoring the production, Apparat, whose real name is Sascha Ring, decided...

You don’t look to the Managing Editor of Entertainment Weekly for music tips, but it was still jaw-dropping to read this in his post-Grammy editorial: “Mumford & Sons’ victory established folk rock as the most exciting and artful movement in music right now.” Do people really think that?...