Over a peppy, horn-laden Just Blaze beat fabricated from a vintage Kool & The Gang tune, an emergent Jersey City emcee erupted with buoyant youthful hubris about his sexual...
Desolate fragments of sound and delicate piano shape this superb ambient release from Paul Corley.
Franz Nicolay is possibly too talented for his own good. A multi-instrumentalist, when he finally took center stage after spending time in the likes of the World/Inferno...
I haven’t been able to put my fingers on documentation, but I’m pretty sure Franz Nicolay is the flamboyant, younger brother of the Mountain Goats’ CEO John Darnielle. Both are...
Morning. Are you in the mood for a cozy new dream pop album? If yes, please check out Happy New Year! Happy New Year – Happy New Year Filed under: 2012, Pop
Back in 2006, an unsigned Brooklyn rapper named Troy Ave, barely out of his teens, appeared on BET's "Rap City" with a video for "Rep It With My Heart"/"BK, BK", a promising take...
Over the course of his career, Nas has declined from World's Best MC (back in the Illmatic days) to "oh yeah, that guy" territory (pretty much everything after It Was Written...
Nas has been disappointing people nearly half his life. By now, the passion play of raised and swiftly dashed hopes that occurs whenever he announces a new album has repeated...
Nasir Bin Olu Dara Jones aka Nasty Nas is finally back with his first independent album since his controversial Untitled album (2008). And after taking it all in, I can’t help but...
Today, Life Is Good for Nas… but it couldn’t have gone that way without Illmatic.
You hear the arthritic rumble of the train. The 100-ton iron horse clacking at 55 miles per hour through the tunnel to nowhere. Stainless steel cars bombed with balloon letters in...
Do you have over 100 Ralph Lauren Polo articles of clothing in your wardrobe? Do you rep Harlem till you die? You may be a Lo Life and not even know it. But chances are, if you...
NY rapper transmutes trad gully to downtown industrial punk, 'cause grit is grit.
The Brownsville MC's newest LP puts weight behind the wisdom of age and experience. Fittingly, it's the kind of record that takes a bit of experience to really sink in.
Hey bro, have you heard of this band called Scholar, bro? *adjusts Castro hat for 90 seconds to get it just the right kind of crooked* They're this pop-punk band who write some...
It's tempting to compare Zambri to Tegan and Sara. Both bands feature siblings singing about love, loss, and the madness found in between. Cristi Jo and Jessica Zambri's vocal...
It was ‘Action in the Kitchen’ that did it. Before then, we weren’t all that convinced about Action Bronson. From what we’d heard of him, he was a Ghostface Killah hand-me-down, a...
Young Magic's music bears more multicultural marks than James Franco's passport. Although, even with extensive genre hopscotching, debut album Melt rarely rises above the level of...
Taken track by track however, the songs explore deep into layers of glossed production and fill headphones with spaced, sampled bliss. It spills and surrounds with real beauty...
From their name on down, Young Magic seem very of-the-moment. Their debut album pulls together West African rhythms, twitchy beats, and the requisite layer of reverb.
Young Magic have a lot going on throughout their debut full-length, Melt. The New York City-by-way-of-Australia trio tackle more in 11 songs than most bands do in an entire...
On Havoc and Prodigy's first recording since the latter's release from prison, Mobb Deep sound unsure where they stand, too proud to change their style and too much of a name...
The undeniably talented Queens rapper follows his breakthrough Dr. Lecter with this collaboration with producer Statik Selektah.
Rapper’s new album has staying power way beyond any flavour-of-the-month fascination.
On their first commercially released album, Das Racist sound unimpressed by their own staggering ability, as if the actual process of making Relax didn't turn out to be as...