Open wide, kids! Here comes another dose of glossy sugar-coated despair from sonic sensations Passion Pit! Brooklyn transplants and Pitchfork darlings Passion Pit burst onto the scene just over three years ago with their special brand of...

I’m standing in line at Smith’s Olde Bar, waiting to make the ascent to the legendary upstairs room. I don’t think I’ve ever waited in line for a show here — probably the first indication that I’m...

Gossip sure have come a long way from their early soulful backwoods punk sound. Nowhere is this more apparent than with this latest release, A Joyful Noise, their fifth studio album (and their second on Columbia Records). With...

I step into the back room of The Earl — that notoriously stuffy, sweaty, cramped back room — and am shocked to find that it’s cool, breezy, and almost entirely empty. It’s already an hour after doors,...

I don’t know what I was expecting, really. I couldn’t quite wrap my mind around the mental image I had of a crowd of metalheads awkwardly bobbing their heads to horn-laden salsa beats. So it’s no understatement...

The Rialto is pitch dark and I’m scribbling notes in my trusty Moleskine, aided only by the shielded glow of my cellphone. Tonight we are being treated to a brilliant collaboration between Malian guitarist Vieux Farka Touré...

I am sucking down my second Crown & Coke in the gloomy basement of some pizza joint over in the Old Fourth Ward, preparing to have my socks rocked off in mere minutes. But what could this...

  I’m in Little Five Points on a Wednesday night, congregating on the sidewalk with a motley crew of folks who draw stares and raised eyebrows from more than a few OTP day-trippers who pass by. One...

It seems like the only things we hear about Mali these days have to do with coup attempts (failed or successful) and the imaginary-sounding-but-actually-real place called Timbuktu. But the best thing to come out of Mali in...

Paul Weller first made a name for himself as the smartly dressed but thoroughly pissed off spokesman for an entire generation of disillusioned youth. The poster child for pogoing, suit-wearing mod-punks everywhere, Weller founded the massively influential...