RiYL

It’s clear that Pell is calling in from a hotel room. He’s back in Los Angeles, wearing a Dodgers hat to match his former adopted home. Like so many, however, the pandemic brought the importance of home into stark relief for the rapper/producer. This latest trip to Southern California mostly involves moving some belongings and tying up some loose ends. The past year has found Pell sharing the spot...

This January, Chris Murphy was diagnosed with Bell’s Palsy. Later that month, the Sloan bassist posted a photo on Instagram, stating, in part,  "It’s a drag but it could be worse. I have a great doctor who is on top of my treatment. Of course, I hope I get better. If I had to sum up my feelings in a facial expression, it’s the one I have." It summed up the musician’s general approach to things — s...

In February, Steve Lukather released I Found The Sun Again. The guitarist’s eight solo album arrived alongside an LP by Joseph Williams, featuring heavy contributions the Toto singer, along with bandmate David Paich. Lukather and Paich have maintained constants across the band’s 44 year history (though the latter has been forced to retire from touring over health-related reasons). It’s a timeline...

A quarterly of reissues from Drawn & Quarterly has offered a fresh opportunity to reexamine King Cat. Not that there’s every a bad time to revisit John Porcellino’s work. The cartoonist has self-published nearly 80 issues of the series over the past 32 years. The black and white mini comic remains both deeply influential and extremely singular, built from a DIY ethos that informs all of his work,...

[Spotty audio warning] Released in February, The Pahrump Report chronicles Lisa Carvers years in the titular Nevada City. A strange town in the desert some 90 minutes outside of Las Vegas, the writer found her new home on something of a whim. When we caught up, Carver had already left the town for other locations in Nevada and was planing an escape to Africa. Pahrump, for all of its magic — and, p...

The past few years found her trying something new — or, rather, old. With a pair cover albums, Juliana Hatfield first tackled the song of Olivia Newton-John and the then Police — both to rave reviews. Earlier this month, the singer-songwriter released a new solo album — her 19th. Titled Blood, the LP explores the divisiveness and psychological tole the last four years have had on much of the Ameri...

Released in 2020, And Now, Sir — Is This Your Missing Gonad features familiar faces from Jim Woodring’s Frank universe. As ever, the artist’s masterfully fine-tuned art marries the precious with the horrific, but this time further obfuscates meaning with the addition of seemingly random captions. More than 30 years after first putting frank to paper is his self-published mini comic, Jim, Woodring...

By his own admission, George Lewis Jr. makes too much music. He describes it like an addition — referencing a folder on his desktop started in late 2019 with 150 song he confesses no one will likely ever hear. Of course, there’s plenty has shared, as a producer, songwriter and, most notably, as Twin Shadow. After a move to Brooklyn, the project began in earnest with 2010’s release of Forget, which...

The third in a trilogy, For My Mama And Anyone Who Look Like Her is McKinley Dixon’s most personal and deeply-felt work to date. The musician has taken in new experiences and explored new sounds, all while looking to explore stories that don’t get told nearly enough on record. Like much of Dixon’s work, the album sets thoughtful hip-hop verses to live jazz instrumentation. It’s electric and vibran...

There are all manner of reasons The Secret to Superhuman Strength was eight years in the making. For one, Alison Bechdel was dealing with the rather surreal experience of watching her book, Fun Home, be adapted into a successful Broadway musical (soon to be a major motion picture). There was also the matter of turning 60, which the cartoonist did last year — a perfect beat on which to end a book b...

As the conversation winds down, I go grab my painting off the wall for the artist to describe. It’s a rare opportunity. It’s also the second time in a month that I’ve done this on Zoom call, following a recent one with friends where we all realized we had Keenes on our wall. In certain circles, Steve Keene’s work has become a fixture. A generation discovered the artist through his cover paintings...

As a second generation harpist, Mary Lattimore may have been born to play the instrument. After picking up the instrument at 11 and studying at the Eastman School of Music, however, she began to forge her own path with the instrument. A stint in Philadelphia found the music integrating into the indie rock scene, adapting a traditionally classical instrument to accompany the likes of Kurt Vile and...

As much as anything, Time Between is an opportunity to reflect on a remarkable career. It’s one that found a young Chris Hillman falling in love with country and bluegrass, playing his way up the ranks and landings a gig as the bass player for an up-and-coming L.A. band called, the Byrds.    The musician is every bit as modest in conversation as he is in his memoir. He’ll be the first to admit tha...

Last March, Amazon announced that the Kids in the Hall would be returning to television sketch com after 25 years. The troupe never really broke up — or at least not for long. In the intervening years, the quintet made a movie, toured North America and in 2008, released the miniseries, Death Comes to Town. The new show will return the troupe to the sketch comedy it has been performing since the mi...

In 2017, Josh Radnor entered the music world in earnest with a major assist from Australian indie-popper, Ben Lee. After two records as Radnor and Lee, he stepped out alone for the first time this year with a solo EP. Paired down down 15-17 songs, One More Then I’ll Let You Go is named in honor of a particularly fruitful period in Radnor’s burgeoning songwriting career. It’s a new world for Radnor...

Relative Fiction finds Nicole Georges returning to familiar territory. Eight years after the release of her book, Calling Dr. Laura, the podcast miniseries serves as both a followup and expansion to that deeply personal work. In both, the cartoonist explores the story of a father she grew up believing was dead. Following a tip from a psychic, she discovered the truth about her family and began exp...

It’s a perfect rock and roll story, and Butch Vig swears it’s true. The day that Kurt Cobain died is the day same day he met future bandmate Shirley Manson. Some things are just meant to be, perhaps. It was a profound turning point for the producer’s career. One of the era’s most successful producers going on to form one of the decade’s most popular rock bands, Garbage. These days, Vig continues t...

By most accounts, the heyday of the guitar as a pop cultural force is several decades in the past. But every so often, an artist emerges who breathes new life into the instrument. A musician happy to explore the fringes of her own musical boundaries, Kaki King’s instrument music is consistently fresh and nearly impossible to categorize. Released during the pandemic, Modern Yesterdays finds the gui...

Sixteen years is an eternity in this world. But for Bob Forrest, the time was right finally right for a reunion. A brilliant outgrowth of the Los Angeles 80s punk scene, Thelonious Monster flirted with major label success, signing to Capitol Records for 92’s Beautiful Mess. The group  failed to reach the heights of contemporaries like Jane’s Addiction and the Red Hot Chili, finally self-destructin...

Ginseng Roots finds Craig Thompson returning childhood memoir — albeit in an entirely different form. Currently being serialized as mini-comics through Uncivilized Press, the series is as much the story of ginseng cultivation as it is his formative years growing up in rural Wisconsin. It’s a chance to revisit some important aspects of his youth that failed to make it into his epic 600-page book, B...

 “Something I realized after we spoke that I curiously never had noticed before,” Peter Stampfel wrote in an email shortly after our interview, “big similarity that hallucinogens and the Smith Anthology both had on me: I saw that the world was much more strange and much more vast than I had previously thought.” The musician’s own long, strange career has almost certainly had its own profound effec...

“Power, wealth and mental health,” Craig Finn offers a succinct tagline for a hypothetical Open Door Policy movie poster. These themes, among others, including technology, working and inequality under capitalism clearly emerged as the lyrics for the latest Hold Steady record came into focus. To borrow a quote the singer, in turn, borrowed from Joan Didion, “I write entirely to find out what I'm th...

Peter and the Wolves is a lot of things. It’s both memoir and biography, as Adele Bertei recounts her early days in music, while showing an oft-ignored side of friend and mentor, Peter Laughner. The  Pere Ubu/Rocket from the Tombs guitarist gave the musician her earliest break in Cleveland, only to die at age 24, following longtime substance abuse. Back in print, Bertei’s book is an effort to show...

There’s a darkness to Catspaw — something that lurks beyond the innocuous and even adorable title. Culled from an episode of the original Star Trek, Matthew Sweet’s usage is evocative of a certain doom. For an album finished before Covid-19 really took hold, the mood is certainly in keeping with the present moment. Not that things were particularly great prior to the pandemic, of course. Equally f...

A lot has changed in the nearly five years since the the launch of Beautiful/Anonymous — some for the better and many for the worst. Certainly, the need to listen and be heard has only grown stronger during a pandemic that has left many alienated and alone. Earlier this month, host Chris Gethard announced that the Earwolf series will become a TV show, adding a visual element to the long conversati...