Cloudspeakers

Who knew that what is supposed to be Kieran Hebden’s likeable dance record would end up, at least for his fans, a strange kind of divisive? Its quality is already widely acknowledged, but thereâ€... Read more

I know what you’re expecting. CMG is reviewing a band calling itself Boomsnake, so this must be one of those things where we talk about something crass and pop-cultural and mass marketed and we a... Read more

For those unfamiliar, Yeasayer are a Brooklyn-based quartet who enjoyed some buzz and much critical acclaim around the release of their 2007 debut All Hour Cymbals. That record was mostly shitty an... Read more

Hard to admit that We’re on Your Side is a step down for this great band, if only because it’s at least as technically adept and effortlessly listenable as their Private Cinema—an album t... Read more

Strange that music which seems so grounded in tangibles—the blue-collar mores of folk and the occasional bluegrass, the dust and backwoods of rural Americana—should lend itself with suc... Read more

Castanets’ Raymond Raposa has lived the dream, at least insofar as post-apocalyptic hippy folk nightmares go. Traveling lonely American highways for years at a time by Greyhound bus; recording al... Read more

An ersatz movement devolving from an obsessive fixation on authenticity, lo-fi garage rock—in this era of pure volume (meaning quantity rather than aural assault)—is thoroughly predicta... Read more

I’ve been turning the notion over and over in my head for days, rolled the phrase around on my tongue, and can say that with each subsequent listen to Transition it feels right to declare the alb... Read more

Strictly speaking not much has changed since this Japanese trio’s debut EP Neji/Tori washed up on North American shores, but somehow that previous effort had so much charming belligerence and fer... Read more

Oneida get a lot of mileage out of their boredom; I’ve never heard a band whose music sounds so much like the result of indie rock and post-punk distended and stretched until they no longer resem... Read more