The Kiss show at Tokyo Dome on March 3 was the third time I’ve seen the band play live. The first time was in Sydney in 1980 — my first-ever live concert. At 13, I was a massive Kiss fan, dressed to the nines and all made up like the ...
It has been a year since post-hardcore group Fact released an artist photo with the six members’ faces revealed. Before ...
Bjork has become the latest among a small number of pop stars to refuse to stream an album, saying it ...
The music industry has announced an agreement to release albums globally on Fridays, ending divergences among regions that have fueled piracy in an age of instant music. Key groups representing music retailers, record companies and artists said that they would coordinate album releases to ...
For his fourth solo album, “American Interior,” Super Furry Animals frontman Gruff Rhys went the extra mile. Or more accurately, the extra 1,800 miles. Following in the footsteps of his distant relative, 18th-century Welsh explorer John Evans, Rhys precisely retraced the long journey taken ...
The worlds of indie and club music are hardly irreconcilable, either in difference or distance, but it can often be hard to spot crossover success that extends beyond one-off hits or remix packages. Step forward Dan Snaith, aka Caribou. The Canadian musician is a ...
When a traffic accident on Feb. 26, 2010, claimed the life of independent hip-hop auteur Jun Seba, who recorded and DJed under the name Nujabes, even some of his closest collaborators didn’t find out until a few weeks later. The Japanese rapper Shingo Annen, ...
Up a backstreet in Shibuya’s Udagawacho neighborhood, tucked in behind the Milky Way, Chelsea Hotel and Star Lounge live-music venues — an area tight with record stores — I’m on my way to a party crammed with style-conscious young folk in sweaters and berets, ...
A group of Guatemalan musicians is on a mission to breathe life into a pre-Columbian language and heritage through a thoroughly modern genre: hip-hop. Calling themselves Balam Ajpu, which means Jaguar Warrior or Warrior of Light, they rap in the ancient Maya Tz’utujil language ...
Josh Klinghoffer sounds exhausted even after taking a nap, “I didn’t feel so well today,” he says over the phone from Los Angeles. He has worked himself into the ground over the past few days, working with the Red Hot Chili Peppers on their ...
Koto player Michiyo Yagi is a national treasure like no other. Why she isn’t the most famous musician in all of Japan blows my feeble mind. She’s a Japanese woman playing the koto — the most Japanese of Japanese musical instruments. She’s part of ...
Although no longer the economical solution they were back when we still had to buy records, label samplers in the age of copious amounts of free music have become indispensable once again for a slightly different reason — to combat paralysis of choice. “Shiori ...
Idol group AKB48 elicits extreme reactions from people. The unit has nurtured a rabid fanbase who are willing to buy multiple copies of a single CD to show their devotion. On the other hand, critics despise the group’s brand of by-the-book pop and the ...
Belle and Sebastian are headed back to Japan, but are not quite as you remember them. For nearly 20 years the Glasgow indie darlings have been pigeonholed as producers of twee, lovelorn songs for corduroy-clad outcasts, but with their newly released ninth album, that ...
For many visiting musicians, a Japanese tour consists of a brief, meticulously coordinated onslaught of gigs, interviews and in-store appearances, possibly capped by a karaoke session with the record label’s PR team. Few get to spend six weeks schlepping around the country on an ...
