They’re an odd bunch, the Scandinavians. Maybe it’s because they live in a place where either the sun never sets or it doesn’t seem to rise at all, depending on the season. But one thing’s certain, they make wonderfully melancholy music. With artists such as Swedish ex-pro soccer player Nicolai Dunger, Iceland’s the Funerals and [...]

The same America that gave us the Beach Boys also gave us Charles Manson, and for every Woodstock there’s an Altamont. Amid the gatefold-sleeved nostalgia for summer breaks, first loves or your first joint is the half-memory of that house on the block where something bad happened or the woods where a body was once [...]

Hayden’s voice is as light as an angel’s kiss, and his songs creep up on you slowly, cozily unfolding like the half-remembered pieces of a waking dream. His blissed-out, lo-fi acoustica has won him fans from Steve Buscemi, who hired him to help score his directorial debut Trees Lounge, to Neil Young, who once signed [...]

The same America that gave us the Beach Boys also gave us Charles Manson, and for every Woodstock there’s an Altamont. Amid the gatefold-sleeved nostalgia for summer breaks, first loves or your first joint is the half-memory of that house on the block where something bad happened or the woods where a body was once [...]

I should probably tell you how the Posies’ Frosting On The Beater nursed me through a particularly bad breakup, but that’s private and you don’t need to know. Suffice to say anything Ken Stringfellow does is likely to have a special place in my heart, and Touched bends over backward to earn every inch of [...]

A Mark Eitzel gig can be the equivalent of a slow-motion car crash, painful to watch but impossible to look away. One performance I saw deteriorated into a heated war of words between the mightily pissed-off troubadour and some drunken hecklers. I wanted to walk out but couldn’t, convinced Eitzel would miraculously turn things around [...]

Mark Lanegan is what the late Bill Hicks would’ve called a ‘six-lighters-a-day man,’ sounding not only like he smokes cigarettes by the truckload, but eats the ashtrays too. When coupled with the heavy psychedelia of his former band the Screaming Trees, his ocean-deep, molasses-thick baritone resulted in sonic assaults of seismic proportions. However, his solo [...]