Alfred Soto
Alfred Soto is a visiting professor in the Department of Communication at Florida International University. His work has appeared in Billboard, SPIN, Pitchfork, The Village Voice, MTV, The Miami Herald, among other publications. He is an associate editor of The Singles Jukebox and was features editor of Stylus Magazine. He lives in Miami.
44 articles
List of articles in the library
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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. ...
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 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 ...
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 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 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 ...
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 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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 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 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 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. ...
Daryl Hall: "I love the fact that record companies are all going down"
Comment by Alfred Soto, Humanizing the Vacuum, 21 August 2007
A LIVELY DARYL HALL interview in, of all places, Pitchfork. ...
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 ...
Angel Olsen: Burn Your Fire for No Witness
Review by Alfred Soto, Spin, 21 February 2014
ANGEL OLSEN buries a thesis statement at the end of her third album, Burn Your Fire for No Witness. On 'Window', over a barely audible ...
Dwight Yoakam: Second Hand Heart
Review by Alfred Soto, Spin, 13 April 2015
ARTISTS DEPENDENT ON TRADITION as muse and subject gamble on fate. Eventually the marketplace will deal — so they think. Well, Dwight Yoakam has won ...
Review by Alfred Soto, Spin, 20 July 2015
THE SINGER AND WRITER of the most exquisite sighs in modern country, Ashley Monroe doesn't come off as a mope. Her high, fluting voice projects ...
The Libertines: Anthems for Doomed Youth
Review by Alfred Soto, Spin, 15 September 2015
NOW THAT CARL BARÂT AND PETE DOHERTY have proven they are capable of collaborating again, they can go away and write a better album than ...
Brandy Clark: Big Day in a Small Town
Review by Alfred Soto, Spin, 6 June 2016
A WRITER SINGING HER OWN SONGS isn't necessarily a singer. Brandy Clark made this point clear on 2013's 12 Stories; the title's J.D. Salinger allusion ...
Review by Alfred Soto, Spin, 15 June 2017
Ride's disappointing comeback album lacks the things that made them great. ...
The Killers: Wonderful Wonderful
Review by Alfred Soto, Spin, 2 October 2017
AT LAST I KNOW: George Herbert is Brandon Flowers' Rosetta Stone. Writing from the point of view of an object of sacramental importance or as ...
tUnE-yArDs: I Can Feel You Creep into My Private Life
Review by Alfred Soto, Spin, 25 January 2018
MERRILL GARBUS COULD SING in Esperanto through sixteen vocal filters and it still wouldn't stop listeners from parsing her lyrics. Nonetheless, with her Tune-Yards project, ...
Review by Alfred Soto, Spin, 20 March 2018
FEW WORDS DESCRIBE Kim Deal's songwriting and delivery of emotion better than "terse". In the Pixies and a series of Breeders albums she presented herself ...
Yo La Tengo: There's a Riot Going On
Review by Alfred Soto, Spin, 20 March 2018
THE MOST VULGAR thing about Yo La Tengo's latest is its nod to Sly and the Family Stone's 1971 landmark: on the Hoboken trio's fifteenth ...
Courtney Barnett: Tell Me How You Really Feel
Review by Alfred Soto, Spin, 14 June 2018
TO BE COURTNEY BARNETT and learn that Liz Phair released the Girly-Sound to Guyville set is like being Bryan Ferry and opening your door to ...
Review by Alfred Soto, Humanizing the Vacuum, 23 August 2018
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Chic: What Is Chic in 2018? It's About Time Gives an Unsatisfactory Answer
Review by Alfred Soto, Spin, 4 October 2018
WEALTHY AND COOL ENOUGH to maintain a reputation on the sweet fragrance of thirty years' worth of fumes, Nile Rodgers nevertheless wanted a new Chic ...
Review by Alfred Soto, Spin, 15 May 2019
A DUBYA-ERA STAR whose pop distillations of crunk failed to win her label's confidence at the turn of the decade, Ciara Princess Harris has spent the time since ...
Poppy, Selena Gomez: Selena Gomez: Rare, Poppy: I Disagree
Review by Alfred Soto, Humanizing the Vacuum, 23 January 2020
In my first reviews of new music since realizing I hadn't finished half my Xmas shopping, I examine a pair of albums by a star ...
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