When Arab Strap disbanded in 2006 after playing a series of farewell shows, it appeared to be the last we would ever hear from the Scottish duo. Sure, singer Aidan Moffat and Malcolm Middleton would resurface as solo artists making records under their birth names and other guises, but such endeavors seemed like only added nails to the coffin.

Moffat and Middleton had emerged as …

Someone once said that suffering breeds great art, but I wonder what they would have made of a year spent dealing with a global pandemic. For 20 years

To put it bluntly, 2020 can suck it. There have been few years that have been so catastrophic to so many people as this past year. If the coronavirus pandemic and the hell that it wrought weren’t enough, we also had to endure police brutality of an unprecedented level and the trashfire that occupied the White House and threatened to undermine our democratic process this …

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With the band including members of Huggy Bear and Male Bonding, it’s hard not to have high expectations for the debut album from Adulkt Life, Book of Curses

Begun 50 years ago, when the shrewd owner of Club Baobab (so named because it was built around a baobab tree) in Dakar poached members of the house

Still several years before it became a hipster utopia worthy of it own sketch comedy TV show, I moved to Portland on a whim from New York City. It only took

These are strange times we are living in, with the coronavirus having affected nearly every aspect of human existence across the globe. Live music has

Though their jangly guitars and penchant for pop melodies bore some of the hallmarks of the so-called C86 sound, more than anything else what united the Close Lobsters with the other acts on the NME’s legendary cassette compilation was an ethos of self-made ingenuity. Born in the Scottish town of Paisley (about 10 miles east of Glasgow) in 1985 out of a surprisingly thriving punk …

Melenas, which translates roughly to “heads of hair,” are an all-female quartet hailing from Pamplona, Spain (yep, of bulls running through the streets fame)