Stylus
Stylus was an American online music and film magazine launched in 2002 and co-founded by Todd L. Burns. It featured long-form music journalism, and daily music reviews. In 2006, the site was chosen by the Observer Music Monthly as one of the Internet's 25 most essential music websites. The website ceased to publish new content in October 2007.
150 articles
List of articles in the library
Squarepusher: Do You Know Squarepusher (Warp Records)
Review by Todd L. Burns, Stylus, December 2002
SQUAREPUSHER's latest release, Do You Know Squarepusher mines a lot of the territory that his return to drill 'n bass, Go Plastic, did. He also ...
Tatu: 200 KM/H In The Wrong Lane (Interscope)
Review by Todd L. Burns, Stylus, 9 January 2003
DESPITE THE obviously imperfect title for American audiences, Tatu has constructed an admirable English language album rife with two potentially hit singles and one of ...
Review by Todd L. Burns, Stylus, September 2003
AT THE SAME TIME that ragga is making its presence known in the mainstream with the likes of Sean Paul and Wayne Wonder hitting the ...
Alec Empire: Intelligence and Sacrifice
Review by Todd L. Burns, Stylus, 1 September 2003
DIGITAL HARDCORE. These two words, because of one man's influence, have come to encompass an entire genre of music that was once regarded as the ...
Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 1 September 2003
AH, TEENAGE KICKS. Tim Wheeler may be 25 now, but he still knows that first love, while maybe not the deepest or longest-lasting, is always ...
Asian Dub Foundation: Community Music
Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 1 September 2003
ASIAN DUB FOUNDATION formed in the mid-nineties, the product of a government-sponsored scheme designed to teach young Asian men music technology, two teachers, their pupil ...
(British) Sea Power: British Sea Power: The Decline Of British Sea Power
Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 1 September 2003
WHAT IS THE POWER of the British sea? An odd thing, for sure. A five-piece from Brighton, guitars and keys and drums and voices and ...
Review by Todd L. Burns, Stylus, 1 September 2003
CEX IS NAKED. Underneath all of the electronics and the posturing of who has the best software plug-ins and the never ending contest of who ...
Review by Todd L. Burns, Stylus, 1 September 2003
FOR ALL YOU KIDS OUT THERE that haven't been on the IDM tip of things, which is... well... uh... 99% of you, the genre is ...
Chris Clark - UK: Chris Clark: Clarence Park
Review by Todd L. Burns, Stylus, 1 September 2003
IT SEEMS THAT YOU CAN TELL a lot from album cover art. When looking at the Warp Records output it doesn't take a genius to ...
Review by Todd L. Burns, Stylus, 1 September 2003
GLEN BALLARD, Ron Fair, Linda Perry, Scott Storch, Steve Morales, Balewa Muhammad, Rob Hoffman, E. Dawk, Heather Holley, and Christina Aguilera are all labeled on ...
Clue To Kalo: Come Here When You Sleepwalk
Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 1 September 2003
IS THE LEGACY OF PUNK all those perky Californian skaters proffering spiky three-minute teen-baiting paeans to onanism and bad hair? Or is it something entirely ...
Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 1 September 2003
IN WHICH COMMON GOES MAD. Not sure exactly what happened in the time since 2000's excellent Like Water For Chocolate, but it appears to have had ...
Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 1 September 2003
WHEN I WAS 8 OR 9 YEARS OLD our school had a guest speaker come and talk to us about the years he had spent ...
Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 1 September 2003
DURING THE RECORDING of What's Going On Marvin Gaye would apparently lock himself alone in a room for an hour or more each day to ...
Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 1 September 2003
IN 1996 JOSH DAVIS RELEASED ...Endtroducing, an expansive, intricate and morose tapestry of samples that wove brass, pianos, filtersweeps and hip hop beats together, creating ...
Review by Todd L. Burns, Stylus, 1 September 2003
REIGNING IN THE EXCESSES of both, Dolmen is Jason Sloan and Steven Smith. On the recently released solo album of Smith, Daye of Skye's The ...
Review by Todd L. Burns, Stylus, 1 September 2003
AS THE SUMMER rushes headlong into its second half, it's perhaps a pertinent portion of information to note: at least half of the hottest summer ...
Gillian Welch: Soul Journey (Acony)
Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 1 September 2003
GILLIAN COULD HAVE COME DOWN from the mountains after Oh Brother and made the step into the wind that would have carried her to prosperity. ...
Jim O'Rourke: I'm Happy And I'm Singing And A 1, 2, 3, 4
Review by Todd L. Burns, Stylus, 1 September 2003
CLAIMING TO HAVE been hugely into minimalism and avant garde music by the time he hit high school, Jim O'Rourke's stock took a blow in ...
Review by Todd L. Burns, Stylus, 1 September 2003
ONE OF THE FEW SURVIVORS and true innovators of the trip-hop movement, Lamb returns here with the re-release of their third album. Placed on the ...
M83: Dead Cities, Red Seas, and Lost Ghosts (Gooom Disques)
Review by Todd L. Burns, Stylus, 1 September 2003
M83: Dead Cities, Red Seas, and Lost Ghosts, 'Unrecorded', 1:40–2:20 ...
Review by Todd L. Burns, Stylus, 1 September 2003
SO BEGINS THE SECOND ROUND OF SHEMO. With a live disc in the works for Avril Lavigne and the next full length presumably in the ...
Review by Todd L. Burns, Stylus, 1 September 2003
CRITICAL DEAD ENDS for an album full of musical dead ends: Perhaps what Moby does best is construct songs. And when I say construct, I mean ...
Review by Todd L. Burns, Stylus, 1 September 2003
NOW, I DON'T HATE MOBY because he uses the same synth string sound in each song, a sound that feels like it needs something. I ...
Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 1 September 2003
SHE KNOWS WHAT SHE'S TALKING ABOUT because she's come from there. She started off with So Solid Crew but as soon as they started breaking ...
Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 1 September 2003
HAVE WARHOL'S predictions (desires) come true? Is art now pop and is pop now art? Can either be considered real or worthy or authentic? It ...
Review by Todd L. Burns, Stylus, 1 September 2003
WHO WOULDA THUNK IT? Pink, much like Vitamin C, seemed to have one interesting portion to her image. The music was capable, but the lyrics ...
Shack: Here's Tom With The Weather
Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 1 September 2003
IT'S FITTING that Shack's new album (their third? fourth? — the Head brothers have lost so many master tapes and had so many pseudonyms over ...
Super Furry Animals: Phantom Power
Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 1 September 2003
I SLIPPED OFF Rings Around The World like an ant off frictionless glass, its expensive and slick production screaming "maturity!" and "longevity!" at me until ...
Bees, The (Isle of Wight): The Bees: Sunshine Hit Me
Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 1 September 2003
SUNSHINE ON WAX. This record is delicious. For the last 25 years or so the most important influence on British music has not been American pop ...
Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 1 September 2003
AN ARTICLE IN UK STYLE BIBLE The Face recently revealed that teenage girls in Liverpool have taken to walking round the city centre dressed in ...
The Soft Pink Truth: Do You Party?
Review by Todd L. Burns, Stylus, 1 September 2003
EVER BEEN TOLD you're too nice by your soon to be ex-girlfriend? Drew Daniel hasn't either. But consider this his calling out. Drew. Baby. You're ...
Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 1 September 2003
WELCOME to the twenty-first century alt. rock review. The Vines, as you know, are from Australia, and, as you also know, are the greatest band the ...
Vincent Gallo: Recordings of Music for Film
Review by Todd L. Burns, Stylus, 1 September 2003
PEOPLE SEEM TO ONLY LOVE HIM or hate him. I don't understand what all the fuss is about Vincent Gallo. But I've never seen Buffalo ...
Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 1 September 2003
I LOVED WITNESS' FIRST ALBUM. It caught me by surprise — their first singles were released at about the same time as Doves and Coldplay ...
OutKast: Speakerboxxx / The Love Below
Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 23 September 2003
DRE, A.K.A. ANDRE 3000, a.k.a. Andre Lauren Benjamin, says he's run out of ways to express himself via hip hop. Big Boi, a.k.a. Antwan Andre ...
The Decemberists: Her Majesty the Decemberists
Review by Todd L. Burns, Stylus, 25 September 2003
THE SUCCESS of the Decemberists doesn't lie in the fact that each song that they write is a miniature world, intimately detailed and poetically rendered. ...
Siobhan Donaghy: Revolution In Me
Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 30 September 2003
I'M IN LOVE. It's all projection of course. I've never met her, never seen her in the flesh. Know next to nothing about her. But… It's ...
Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 20 October 2003
THERE SEEMS TO BE VERY LITTLE POINT in reviewing Echoes now that it's finally hit the stores; the UK's been able to purchase it for ...
Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 21 October 2003
DANCE IS DEAD!, proclaim the British broadsheet press. No it isn't!, they say again, three months later, It's just gone underground again!. Whatever, Basement Jaxx ...
Review by Todd L. Burns, Stylus, 28 October 2003
WHEN I WAS YOUNGER, I had a lot of strange listening habits. For instance, I vowed in 1995 to listen to no music made after ...
Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 31 October 2003
ED HANDLEY AND ANDY TURNER have been making exquisitely structured and melodious post-techno Warptronica for more than a decade now, first as part of the ...
Missy Elliott: This Is Not a Test!
Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 1 December 2003
Miss E… So Addictive, spearheaded by the epochal 'Get Ur Freak On', marked a zenith for Missy Elliott and her long-term conspirator Tim Mosley, as ...
Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 12 January 2004
TALK ABOUT ROCKIST; Drive By consists of one hour-long track, meaning you have to listen to the latest album by this intriguing Australian three-piece all ...
Busted: A Present For Everyone
Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 15 January 2004
IT IS, OF COURSE, the awkward-looking blonde one who is the genius behind Busted. And rest assured that I don't use the word "genius" lightly. ...
Review by Todd L. Burns, Stylus, 27 February 2004
ONE GUITAR AND A CAPABLE HIGH FEMALE VOICE. That's about all that can be said to be missing from the equation from the newest offering ...
Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 2 March 2004
Ly·can·thro·py n. 1. In folklore, the magical ability to assume the form and characteristics of a wolf. 2. A kind of erratic melancholy, in which one ...
Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 23 March 2004
THE COVER SCREAMS "PSYCHEDELIC", Craig Nichols' illustrated face warped by a thousand lysergic suns. As you'd expect. The hamburger-scoffing Australian son of grunge and Britpop ...
Review by Todd L. Burns, Stylus, 21 May 2004
NEO-FEMINIST (the kind where everything's quite complicated, frustrating any attempt to truly unpack exactly what's going on), gleefully ignorant of music history (the kind where ...
Cannibal Corpse: The Wretched Spawn
Review by Todd L. Burns, Stylus, 21 May 2004
AFTER EIGHT ALBUMS that helped define gore-death metal, Cannibal Corpse are back with only their second studio album of the new millennium. That's not to ...
Slipknot: Vol. 3: (The Subliminal Verses)
Review by Todd L. Burns, Stylus, 28 May 2004
"NOW IT'S OVER" sings Corey Taylor on the opening dirge of the Iowan nontet's newest album. And, for Slipknot, it did look to be all ...
Nick Drake: Made To Love Magic
Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 3 June 2004
PRECIOUS. TRAGIC. BEAUTIFUL. SENSITIVE. DELICATE. DOOMED. These are some of the words that people use about Nick Drake, born in Rangoon, died in Tamworth-In-Arden. Drake ...
Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 24 June 2004
THE END IS NIGH. This summer, after 15 years, Orbital will cease to be, at least in the form that we have known and loved ...
Circle Takes The Square: As The Roots Undo
Review by Todd L. Burns, Stylus, 7 July 2004
IT'S HARDCORE. You know the score: grinding and lurching guitars, screamed vocals, blast beats and just a bit of nihilism. Circle Takes The Square does ...
The Icarus Line: Icarus Line: Penance Soiree
Review by Todd L. Burns, Stylus, 9 July 2004
IF THE TRANSFORMING POWER of rock has been weakened by various sets of pretenders throughout the years, the first half of Icarus Line's Penance Soiree ...
Bees, The (Isle of Wight): The Bees: Free The Bees
Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 16 July 2004
FREE THE BEES FROM WHAT, exactly? The present? Debut album Sunshine Hit Me was an eccentric, eclectic affair, touched with jazz, funk, Portuguese folk, reggae ...
Bark Psychosis: ///Codename: Dustsucker
Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 26 July 2004
VAPOUR TRAILS of distant airplanes turning orange in the sunset, a smear of royal umber bruise. Universes appear within your iris, tremulous rumbles consume miniscule ...
Jon Langford: All The Fame of Lofty Deeds
Review by Alfred Soto, Stylus, 9 August 2004
FOR A BLOKE WHOSE SONGS ADDUCE Walter Benjamin and Emily Dickinson, Mekons frontman Jon Langford's taste for lowbrow Americana goes a long way towards explaining ...
Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 17 August 2004
SOME TWENTY YEARS AGO Scottish electronics and hi-fi specialists Linn commissioned a local folk band to record a song for them, in order to demonstrate ...
R. Kelly: Happy People / U Saved Me
Review by Todd L. Burns, Stylus, 25 August 2004
THE PIED PIPER, AS THE STORY GOES, came to the town of Hamelin in 1284 playing his flute and swiftly cured its rat plague. After ...
Talking Heads: The Name of This Band is Talking Heads
Review by Alfred Soto, Stylus, 27 August 2004
THE NAME OF ITS LEADER is David Byrne. Until 1987, when U2 and R.E.M.'s declamatory arena moves flexed the populist muscle Byrne could never manage, ...
The Libertines: The Libertines
Review by Alfred Soto, Stylus, 7 September 2004
CARL BARAT AND PETE DOHERTY COULD BE LOVERS; hell, I wish they were. On the cover of their eponymous second album, the singer/guitarists lean breathtakingly ...
Review by Todd L. Burns, Stylus, 17 September 2004
NELLY IS FOR THE CHILDREN. Or, more appropriately, Nelly is for everyone. He’s never made any pretenses otherwise, luckily, so arguments veering towards the thorny ...
Review by Todd L. Burns, Stylus, 17 September 2004
BUT IF SUIT COULDN'T PRODUCE SOMETHING that could come close to 'Lose Yourself', Sweat's opening track, 'Heart of Champion', nearly gets there. That is, until ...
Review by Todd L. Burns, Stylus, 24 September 2004
IF YOU'VE LISTENED from the beginning, you shouldn't expect much. Hilary Duff's debut was a hit and miss affair. Leaving aside the great 'So Yesterday' ...
Review by Todd L. Burns, Stylus, 13 October 2004
CLOCKING IN AT A SVELTE 39 MINUTES, The Blood Brothers third full-length album, Crimes, packs just as many ideas, sounds and punch as its cousin, ...
Cristina: Doll In A Box/Sleep It Off
Review by Todd L. Burns, Stylus, 21 October 2004
IT'S SO OBVIOUS, ISN'T IT? You get a record label and then you ask your wife to make a record. What do you care? You're ...
Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 21 October 2004
SOMEHOW DIRTY VEGAS managed to shift 700,000 copies of their eponymous debut's dance-lite and ended up playing live at Kid Rock and Pamela Anderson's wedding, ...
The Verve: This Is Music – The Singles 92-98
Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 4 November 2004
IN 1995, as a naïve and passionate and occasionally very stoned 16-year-old, I bought a copy of A Northern Soul on spec, because I'd read ...
The Go-Betweens: Liberty Belle & the Diamond Express, Tallulah, 16 Lovers Lane
Review by Alfred Soto, Stylus, 15 November 2004
ROBERT FORSTER and Grant McLennan are my kind of guys. Thoughtful, wary, bemused, these are men who have known love and lost it, kept their ...
U2: How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb
Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 23 November 2004
AH, U2, ONCE AGAIN PERCHED at the apex of world rock cool as they prepare to release (or is that unleash?) their umpteenth album. Mullets, ...
The Chemical Brothers: Push The Button
Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 28 January 2005
IN THE MID-90S it looked as if dance music was on the verge of total crossover into the rock-oriented mainstream, and for a while I ...
Britney Spears: Under The Covers: Britney
Guide by Todd L. Burns, Stylus, 1 February 2005
The Queen of Pop? Since 1999’s …Baby One More Time, Britney has quickly elevated herself to pop royalty via a conflicting series of psycho-sexual messages ...
William Basinski: Silent Night
Review by Todd L. Burns, Stylus, 10 February 2005
IT'S HARD to call a person you've never met in real life a true friend, but for someone who has so much correspondence online, it's ...
Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 14 February 2005
FORGET EVERYTHING you think you know and start all over again. Bloc Party's website declares that they're "an autonomous unit of un-extraordinary kids reared on ...
Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 11 March 2005
EXCESS, THY NAME IS RUFUS. How else do you explain starting the most important album of your career with a 6 minute pseudo-classical drone of ...
Stereophonics: Language. Sex. Violence. Other?
Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 17 March 2005
KELLY JONES HOLDS A GRUDGE — cross him in any which way and he'll take revenge in the best manner he knows; through the power ...
Omar-S: Just Ask The Lonely (FXHE)
Review by Todd L. Burns, Stylus, 1 April 2005
THE FIRST TIME you listen to Omar-S (Alex Smith), especially his debut solo album for his own FXHE Records, you're going to be confused. Which ...
Bryan Ferry: On Second Thought: Bryan Ferry's Mamouna
Retrospective by Alfred Soto, Stylus, 12 April 2005
For better or worse, we here at Stylus, in all of our autocratic consumer-crit greed, are slaves to timeliness. A record over six months old ...
Mariah Carey: The Emancipation of Mimi
Review by Todd L. Burns, Stylus, 14 April 2005
SOMEONE RECENTLY POSITED that there was no greater high and low attained in American culture than those had by Michael Jackson. If that's true, you ...
Maximo Park: A Certain Trigger
Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 11 May 2005
MAXIMO PARK are kinda cool, but also kinda weird. They're a punk band in the modern style but they're on Warp records, which sends you ...
Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 11 May 2005
TO BE HONEST, I've been considering giving up writing about music. Someone told me it was as useful as dancing about architecture — I told ...
Review by Alfred Soto, Stylus, 12 May 2005
THERE'S NOTHING FOOLISH about the Go-Betweens' remarkable consistency, but their arrangements sure could use some hobgoblins. That's the impression I got from listening to their ...
Review by Alfred Soto, Stylus, 31 May 2005
A COMMAND OF MARXIAN DIALECTICS is an impressive talent when writing a term paper, but it means shit in a club. That's what Gang of ...
Oasis: Don't Believe The Truth
Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 31 May 2005
IT SEEMS TO BE that the ever-cyclical, ever-fickle music press is at that point in its orbit where Oasis are deemed cool again. People are ...
Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 17 August 2005
GAZ COOMBES HAS HAD AN INFERIORITY COMPLEX ever since 'Alright' was an enormous pop hit ten years ago; he's spent the intervening decade trying to ...
The Boo Radleys: Find The Way Out
Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 8 September 2005
OH THE BOO RADLEYS. Sadly it appears that they have now been dealt a shite hand by history and will be forever known by most ...
Review by Alfred Soto, Stylus, 30 September 2005
A FORTYSOMETHING whose nerve endings still respond to the impulses of women half her age is a force to be reckoned with. ...
Review by Alfred Soto, Stylus, October 2005
I LOVED LIZ PHAIR'S 2003 EPONYMOUS ALBUM. Sure, the vocals were ProTooled within an inch of their lives, the guitars too emphatic, the attempt at ...
Boards Of Canada: The Campfire Headphase
Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 19 October 2005
ROLAND BARTHES would tell you that myth is a powerful thing, that it perpetuates itself, that it doesn't need to be created, just allowed room ...
Sugababes: Taller In More Ways
Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 20 October 2005
POP ACTS AREN'T SUPPOSED to release four albums, aren't supposed to have careers; they're meant to emerge quickly, define a brief era, and be seen ...
Review by Alfred Soto, Stylus, 4 November 2005
LIKE BRYAN FERRY, Stevie Wonder has been worshipping at the altar of love for so long that he's forgotten that Eros likes his faithful to ...
Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 8 November 2005
KATE BUSH HAS BEEN CHANGING the world since before I was born. I am now 26 and Kate is comfortably in her 40s; logic, sense ...
GoGoGo Airheart: Rats! Sing! Sing!
Review by Alfred Soto, Stylus, 10 November 2005
IMAGINE ALEX CHILTON LEADING LEE "SCRATCH" PERRY through the paces, and you get an inkling of what Mike Vermillion tries to evoke on 'Dub II'. ...
Eurythmics: The Ultimate Collection
Review by Alfred Soto, Stylus, 17 November 2005
THE PREFIX "PSEUDO" DESCRIBED EURYTHMICS so well that it became safe for other bands to use it 10 years after Bowie first made it respectable. ...
Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 30 November 2005
FIRST UP, 'Switch It On' is a fabulous schizophrenia, single of the year, 'Footloose' by way of Bo Diddley, Basement Jaxx, 'Living In Another World' ...
Rosanne Cash: Seven-Year Ache, King's Record Shop, Interiors
Retrospective by Alfred Soto, Stylus, 10 February 2006
IT'S TEMPTING TO BELIEVE that in a better world, Rosanne Cash would inspire as much love and reverence as her father Johnny, but since no ...
Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 27 March 2006
YEAH, I KNOW I'M BIASED. But any "critic" who claims to have some kind of objectivity when reviewing a record is lying anyway — the ...
Review by Alfred Soto, Stylus, 31 March 2006
AT THE END OF 1980'S GAUCHO you'll find Steely Dan's best song — the slow fade of Johnny, the protagonist of 'Third World Man'. The ...
Review by Todd L. Burns, Stylus, 21 July 2006
Kitsch is a tough one, innit? Author Modris Eksteins points out that it "replaces ethics with aesthetics." Next sentence? "Kitsch is the mask of death." ...
Scritti Politti: White Bread, Black Beer
Review by Alfred Soto, Stylus, 24 July 2006
AUDIENCES IGNORE THE TRAVAILS of an aesthete who digs Gaultier pants and Immanuel Kant. Critics are more stupid. But when the aesthete hires producer Arif ...
Review by Todd L. Burns, Stylus, 27 July 2006
CELINE'S GOT THE RIGHT IDEA. There are many that complain about electronic music having no soul. That's probably not the idea that Celine had, though. ...
Review by Alfred Soto, Stylus, 28 July 2006
PREPARE FOR ROCK & ROLL HALL OF FAME interment when critics praise your latest release as Your Best Album Since. When you've recorded a benchmark, ...
Review by Todd L. Burns, Stylus, 2 August 2006
AS MUSICAL PUNCHLINES GO, Alec Empire is getting there. But it wasn't always this way. Back in the 1990's, Empire was at the forefront of ...
Retrospective by Nick Southall, Stylus, 12 September 2006
For better or worse, we here at Stylus, in all of our autocratic consumer-crit greed, are slaves to timeliness. A record over six months old ...
Review by Alfred Soto, Stylus, 3 October 2006
MORE THAN A FEW CRITICS have knocked The Killers for recording a soupy version of Bruce Springsteen's 'Born to Run', but they haven't suggested which ...
Lindsey Buckingham: Under the Skin
Review by Alfred Soto, Stylus, 11 October 2006
THE WORLD IS A SADDER PLACE without another 'Holiday Road'. Despite a Top Ten hit in 1981 (the ethereal 'Trouble') and 30 years of renown ...
Cold War Kids: Robbers and Cowards
Review by Jeff Weiss, Stylus, 13 October 2006
ABOUT A YEAR AGO, I stumbled into the Silverlake Lounge to see a friend's band. The small bar was a mess of dim lights and ...
Camp Lo: Fort Apache (The Mixtape Album)
Review by Jeff Weiss, Stylus, 1 December 2006
I DON'T BELIEVE CAMP LO. The official explanation for their extended hiatus from the rap world was label problems and a desire to "travel." But ...
Review by Todd L. Burns, Stylus, 7 December 2006
IT'S NOT LIKE I KNEW ANY BETTER. You're stuck in the Midwest, you look up to your significantly older brother, and then he thrusts an ...
Bloc Party: A Weekend in the City
Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 5 February 2007
BLOC PARTY HAVE TROTTED OUT the usual "taller, wider, deeper" clichés that follow a critically salivated-upon debut, but what do those words actually mean? The ...
The Parson Red Heads: King Giraffe
Review by Jeff Weiss, Stylus, 6 February 2007
IN THE WU-TANG MANUAL, the RZA confessed that he used to make certain albums hoping they'd come out in the wintertime. He describes Liquid Swords, ...
Review by Alfred Soto, Stylus, 21 February 2007
I DIRECT ANY YOUNG WOMAN looking for a role model to Lucinda Williams's eponymous 1988 breakthrough. Williams was like Chrissie Hynde's younger sister, not privy ...
Review by Jeff Weiss, Stylus, 22 February 2007
ELVIS PERKINS'S OUTSTANDING DEBUT RECORD, Ash Wednesday, is sad. Eleven meditations on the fleeting nature of existence filled with china-delicate melodies, sparkling acoustic chords, and ...
Patrick Wolf: The Magic Position
Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 26 February 2007
THE ESSENCE OF PATRICK WOLF is captured for a fleeting moment during 'Accident & Emergency'. Amidst the lolloping electronic beats, dancefloor anthemics, stereoscoping brass, and ...
Review by Jeff Weiss, Stylus, 1 March 2007
WHO NEEDS JOGGING? The elliptical will get rid of that gut just fine, and you can read while using it. And isn't multi-tasking supposed to ...
Review by Jeff Weiss, Stylus, 8 March 2007
I BLAME KANYE WEST and his unprecedented success in climbing out from behind the boards to become America's ten-times platinum darling, Time magazine cover boy ...
Brother Ali: The Undisputed Truth
Review by Jeff Weiss, Stylus, 25 April 2007
BROTHER ALI'S DEBUT RECORD, 2003's Shadows' lack of cohesion was best summed up in a ham-handed punch-line, wherein Ali declared he was "a cross between ...
Review by Alfred Soto, Stylus, 9 May 2007
NE-YO'S A TRADITIONALIST, alright: like many of his R&B forebears, he has proven incapable of recording an album's worth of material. There's no noticeable advance ...
Review by Jeff Weiss, Stylus, 15 May 2007
THE '80S SEEM ALMOST ARCHAIC in the instant-orgasm Internet age, where everyone has a Netflix account to watch Bulgarian independent DVDs and iPods with enough ...
Inspectah Deck: Uncontrolled Substance
Review by Jeff Weiss, Stylus, 17 May 2007
ON THE SURFACE, it would seem tough to be Inspectah Deck. Sure, there's that whole fame-and-fortune thing, but let's be real, it has to hurt ...
Review by Jeff Weiss, Stylus, 24 May 2007
IF THE INTERNET REINVENTED THE IDEA of the overnight sensation, Voxtrot were some of its first guinea pigs — a bunch of kids in their ...
Maroon 5: It Won't Be Soon Before Long
Review by Alfred Soto, Stylus, 31 May 2007
CADDISHNESS IS ONE of the few character flaws that the pop and indie universes afford the proper respect. For a while in the '90s it ...
Review by Jeff Weiss, Stylus, 7 June 2007
FROM HYPHY TO CRUNK to snap to grime to whatever the fuck Subtle is, hip-hop has split into a wide variety of sub-genres since its ...
Paul McCartney: Memory Almost Full
Review by Alfred Soto, Stylus, 8 June 2007
SINCE I'VE DUTIFULLY AVOIDED the half dozen studio albums released since he scored his last Top 40 hit in 1989, I'm in no position to ...
The Boo Radleys: The Best Of The Boo Radleys
Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 13 June 2007
THERE'S A SERIOUS SENSE of déjà vu accompanying this fifteen-track, hour-long Best of the Boo Radleys compilation, coming as it does less than two years ...
My Morning Jacket: At Dawn and The Tennessee Fire Demos
Review by Jeff Weiss, Stylus, 19 June 2007
IN THE DECADE THUS FAR, scores of pretenders have been hyped as having that elevated and hopelessly nebulous notion of greatness (thanks for stopping by ...
Robert Forster and Grant McLennan: Intermission
Review by Alfred Soto, Stylus, 26 June 2007
FOR ALL THE PROSE designed to render the Go-Betweens as immortals, it's refreshing that their actual records refute this notion so forcefully. Crass and inexplicable ...
Review by Jeff Weiss, Stylus, 29 June 2007
HIP-HOP HISTORY IS LITTERED with MCs blessed with scythe-sharp flows and Byzantine lyrics who couldn't pick out a dope beat if their life depended on ...
Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 2 July 2007
EX-SUGABABES are in danger of becoming as plentiful as ex-members of the Fall, but Siobhan Donaghy, the waif-like, flame-haired original member of the sassy trio, ...
Two Lone Swordsmen: Wrong Meeting II
Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 5 July 2007
MUSICIANS TAKE FAR TOO MUCH TIME between releases. Sure, prolonged touring / promotional schedules and the relentless search for perfection would be valid reasons for ...
Review by Alfred Soto, Stylus, 10 July 2007
INTERPOL ARE TOO EASILY MADE the butt of a joke, but so what? Jokes require no explanation. Since 2002's Turn On The Bright Lights they've ...
Review by Jeff Weiss, Stylus, 11 July 2007
HERE'S THE THING ABOUT THE BEASTIE BOYS: they've always been annoying. Despite their frequent brilliance, success has always come in spite of and not because ...
New Young Pony Club: Fantastic Playroom
Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 19 July 2007
DESPITE ALL the massed proclamations of New Young Pony Club's verve, charisma, and cool, on record they sound bored, listless, and uninterested. It's a studied ...
Review by Alfred Soto, Stylus, 23 July 2007
EVER THE SHAPE-SHIFTER, Prince Rogers Nelson makes his most outrageous move yet. Lots of fans grumble about the lengths to which the artist formerly known ...
Review by Jeff Weiss, Stylus, 31 July 2007
SINCE DAY ONE, Camp Lo have always been Hollywood. Their technicolor tales could only fit on the big screen: blaxploitation fantasies of bloody Bronx shoot-outs, ...
Review by Alfred Soto, Stylus, 7 August 2007
DESPAIR IS THE MEKONS' MUSE. When a band devotes most of its career to cataloguing economic privation and apocalyptic visions, it risks cynicism and indifference. ...
Wilderness Survival: We Were 21 In '03
Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 16 August 2007
WE WERE 21 IN '03 is San Diego-based indie band Wilderness Survival's third album in as many years, and at 50 minutes is also their ...
Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 21 August 2007
TAKEN AT FACE VALUE, 20-year-old popstrel du jour Kate Nash is the Lily Allen it's OK to like — if you need a shot of ...
Super Furry Animals: Hey Venus!
Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 24 August 2007
WITH A FEW EXCEPTIONS I've always liked the idea of Super Furry Animals more than the reality; some of the early, drug-happy eclecticism seemed perhaps ...
Review by Jeff Weiss, Stylus, 5 September 2007
FEW HAVE DONE BETTER THAN THE DEF JUX CREW in capturing the twitchy fractured neurotransmitters of the George Bush/Paris Hilton American schizophrenia of the '00s. ...
Madlib the Beat Konducta: Vol. 3: Live in India
Review by Jeff Weiss, Stylus, 6 September 2007
MADLIB SOUNDS BETTER when you're stoned. This is a pretty widely known fact, one that I have personally verified over several years of dedicated empiricism. ...
Review by Jeff Weiss, Stylus, 13 September 2007
WHEN THE GO! TEAM EMERGED in late 2004, it finally became clear what the Avalanches had been doing for the last half decade: taking gravity ...
Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 19 September 2007
SOME PEOPLE MAY MOURN the passing of Zach Condon's cottage-industry approach and makeshift binary orkestra, the occasionally cacophonous delivery and earnestly clamoring, lo-fi arrangements that ...
The Deadly Syndrome: The Ortolan
Review by Jeff Weiss, Stylus, 27 September 2007
"THERE'S WOLVES IN THE GARDEN," Chris Richard belts out, midway through the fourth song of The Ortolan, the debut from the Silverlake quartet, the Deadly ...
Annie Lennox: Songs of Mass Destruction
Review by Alfred Soto, Stylus, 4 October 2007
FEW THOUGHTS ARE LESS WORTH CONTEMPLATING than Annie Lennox as a woman with feelings and such. As the singer for Eurythmics — still the most ...
Electric Six: I Shall Exterminate Everything Around Me That Restricts Me from Being the Master
Review by Alfred Soto, Stylus, 8 October 2007
ELECTRIC SIX HAS A LEAD SINGER who sounds like Dr. Frank N. Furter playing Bryan Ferry on KISS' Dynasty. Seriously, Dick Valentine would perform 'I ...
Underworld: Oblivion With Bells
Review by Nick Southall, Stylus, 12 October 2007
HOW THE HELL do Underworld still exist? Just past a decade from their cultural peak of the twin bombshells of Second Toughest in the Infants ...
Review by Jeff Weiss, Stylus, 24 October 2007
NOW THAT "FIASCOGATE" has crushed the dreams of the Okayplayer message board junkies who'd hoped to anoint him the rightful heir to the Native Tongues ...
back to LIBRARY
