The last in this triptych of festival previews features Nothing but Thieves (above), the Shelters, Saint Motel, LÉON, and All Them Witches. You don’t need to trip to New Orleans to listen in.
Category: Music List
Five Must-See Baby Bands at Lollapalooza 2016
That’s Dua Lipa up there, and she’s in good company. HÆLOS, Day Wave, Sunflower Bean, and MUNA round out this list of must-see lesser-knowns playing Lolla this year. Learn ’em!
Five Firefly 2016 Acts You Can’t Afford to Miss
Get to know Son Little (photo by Erik Voake), Transviolet, Louis the Child, Laura Stevenson and PVRIS ahead of Dover, Delaware’s Firefly Music Festival. This works for home listening, too.
Sasquatch 2016: Five Up-and-Comers You Need to See
Your cheat sheet to George, Washington’s gorgeous Sasquatch! Festival, starring Tamaryn, SOAK, Kevin Garrett, La Luz, and Briana Marela. Not northwest bound? Tune in at home.
The 15 Best Things I Saw at Coachella 2016
This was my 14th consecutive Coachella, and 17th if you count the short-lived cruise and the two years I went both weekends, but first with Rolling Stone. I teamed up with shutterbug Andy Keilen (that’s his shot of Kamasi Washington above) and writer Steve Appleford to tackle the best fest in the west. Half of the entries on this list are mine. Can you guess which ones without looking at the tags below? Make sure to keep scrolling downward on the article itself.
Kendrick Lamar’s Album of the Year (and 4 more)
It was an honor and a responsibility to write about Kendrick Lamar’s incredible To Pimp a Butterfly. It’s a monumental work that’s owed much more than I could give, but helping to crown it SPIN’s Album of the Year is a good start. I spilled ink on four others that made the year’s 50 Best LPs: Deerhunter’s Fading Frontier at No. 7, Protomartyr’s The Agent Intellect at No. 20, Drake’s If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late at No. 23, and Blur’s Magic Whip at No. 37. Peep the whole list, which not only includes a ton of great music, but words by people I dig a whole lot.
21 Craft Beers Expertly Paired With Rock Albums
A brief list of things I collect: 1) Music. 2) Beer. So when Diffuser asked me to pair 21 brews of my choosing with their alt/indie/rock album equivalents, well, the work was already done. This was a labor o— hiccup! Er, sorry. What was I saying? Oh yeah: pop cap, hit play, cheers.
SPIN’s 300 Best Albums of the Last 30 Years
I went big for this, taking on 30 of the 300 albums. Click through this hulking document for my posts on (in alphabetical order, no spoilers): Arcade Fire, At the Drive-In, Beastie Boys, Beck, Belle & Sebastian, Björk, Bright Eyes, Broken Social Scene, Clipse, Cloud Nothings, Dirty Projectors, the Flaming Lips, the Fugees, Frank Ocean, GZA, Interpol, Jimmy Eat World, Justin Timberlake, the Microphones, My Bloody Valentine, Neutral Milk Hotel, Pixies, Portishead, the Postal Service, Radiohead, TV on the Radio, the Unicorns, Vampire Weekend, the xx, and Wilco. So many of my all-time favorites in here, and so many I’d never had the chance to write about.
Mo’chella 2015: Palm Springs, Top Picks, Best Sets
Never enough Coachella. Here are a few pieces I did for StubHub. They’re made for their music news app (peep it here), hence the minimal site. FKA twigs live photo by Wilson Lee for SPIN.
The Best Music of 2014 (Amazon Edition)
It’s a special year-end list that makes room for Jessie Ware (above), Linkin Park, and Eric Church, and I’m happy to say I spilled positive ink on all three for Amazon’s Best of 2014 albums and songs roundup. Also held forth on such tuneful peeps as Sylvan Esso, Sam Smith, Bleachers, Little Dragon, Chromeo, the War on Drugs, Beck, Charli XCX, Alt-J, FKA Twigs, and ScHoolboy Q, to name a few. Visit Amazon to see what you missed, and why you should care.
Chris Writes Things 