Do you like pop music? Do you like snappy visuals? Well, 2006 was a pretty good year for both. I’m a big fan of Camera Obscura’s loving recreation of early 60s advertising, the Long Blondes’ wittily cinematic split screens, the Bicycles’ endearingly DIY-goofiness, Love is All’s invigorating live...

Pat D writes: Wedz, June 10 : @ Union Pool pollution : http://www.myspace.com/pollutionpollutionpollution - aggressive seasickness with nasty volume. Medusa : http://www.myspace.com/rainunthunder - off-kilter sludgey core, on tour from bloomington, indiana. members of Racebannon. Bloodhorse :...

NOVEMBER 27 — FERNAND BRAUDEL Revolutionary French historian of material life. “Events are the ephemera of history; they pass across its stage like fireflies, hardly glimpsed before they settle back into darkness and as often as not into oblivion. Every event, however brief, has to be sure a...

With Rod Stewart continuing to focus on his solo career, the remaining members of the Faces — guitarist Ron Wood, keyboardist Ian McLagan, and drummer Kenney Jones — have begun to make preparations for a 2010 reunion tour. Simply Red’s Mick Hucknall may be tapped as Stewart’s permanent replacement...

Although Louis Marshall Jones was only around 30 years old when he cut his first acetate for Syd Nathan’s fledgling Dayton, Ohio-based King Records in 1943, he was already known as Grandpa Jones, earning the nickname because he supposedly sounded like an old man when he spoke on the radio, and over...

The guy Steve Berra certainly talks a good talk but … um… IT IS NOT COOL TO PLAY THE GOOD GUY ABOUT TOUGH TIMES AND THEN TURN AROUND AND CHARGE FOLKS THIS AMOUNT OF CASH to participate in your let’s-help-each-other program…

John Mayer’s Battle Studies is estimated to sell between 275,000 and 300,000 copies this week, which should make it the number one album on Billboard’s 200 chart. If it tops the chart, this will be Mayer’s second number one; 2003’s Heavier Things, which sold 317,000 in 2003, was his first. Casting...