This is tenth in a series of articles called “The Record Bin” exploring classic albums from the past.
Quite often, the world of techno can be faceless and cold. Rock has it easy: Pretty much everyone wants to be a rock star, and there are lots of faces that can be identified with rock. Very few [...]

It’s embarrassing, it’s mortifying, and, unless you happen to be one of the lucky bastards with a single, it’s inevitable. There you are, on the verge of consummating your love / like / mutual horniness in the privacy of your one-room triple, a writhing mass of tangled limbs, sweaty, hot and, suddenly, interrupted. You are [...]

There’s something more than a little sad about the state of pop music these days. In this culture of publicity pixies who run press circuits and stand on million-dollar marketing campaigns, it’s easy to be repulsed by how overproduced these acts seem. They’re as slick and immaterial as the plastic shrink-wrap that every [...]

Face it: Rock ‘n’ roll is well-brewed plagiarism served in plastic beer cups. Once you accept that, you realize that everything you’ve heard — every piece of “art” — is just a jarring impulse in that perpetual swagger toward the big urinal in the sky. Following in that great historical tradition, Audioslave — a collaboration [...]

Pearl Jam was arguably the biggest rock band of the ’90s. The so-called “alternative revolution” the band helped to propel wiped much of the then-tired ’80s music off the charts and airwaves. But there seems to be little room on the charts and airwaves for many “alternative” artists today. The alternative revolution came with a [...]

As George Harrison began work on his final album, “Brainwashed,” he knew he might not be around to finish it. Wanting to know the project would be in good hands if he were to pass on, Harrison enlisted both his old friend and Traveling Wilburies bandmate Jeff Lynne, as well as his son Dhani [...]

From the moment you enter the blue and gold tent you realize that this isn’t just any circus. Golden bamboo shoots fill the back part of the stage, and a disturbingly windy sound fills the tent, a bit too reminiscent of the opening performance a few weeks ago where extreme wind and rain prevented the [...]

San Francisco Opera has been a flaming hotbed of controversy this year, and its new production of Handel’s “Alcina” is no exception. This brazenly sexual, postmodern production has only further stoked the coals of partisan passion amongst audiences: Most either love it or loathe it. As far as “Alcina” goes, I unfortunately feel somewhere in [...]

Let’s start with a confession: I’m a complete science fiction geek. Perhaps not your standard, stereotypical sci-fi geek — “Star Wars” and “Star Trek” bore me — but a geek nonetheless. I don’t drool over gadet stories or tales of mankind’s glorious conquest of space, and I demand some literary sophistication, but still, there [...]

If the name Duncan Sheik does not ring a bell, surely the song “Barely Breathing” will take you back to the middle school days of Sony Walkmen and neon scrunchies. Sheik, who, in the early ’90s, paved the way for today’s male solo pop artists such as John Mayer, has recently released his fourth album, [...]