Tag Archives: Ben Lasman

Evil—living like it, sound­ing like it, being it—was some­thing akin to the Holy Grail of Old Weird Amer­ica. Even today, lis­ten­ing to Harry Smith or Good­bye Baby­lon or the Secret Museum of Mankind, the sen­sa­tion is more phys­i­cal than intel­lec­tual, a moon­shine chill … Con­tinue read­ing →

It’s one thing to cash in on “bor­rowed nos­tal­gia from the unre­mem­bered ‘80s,” as James Mur­phy put it. It’s quite another to dig deep into bor­rowed nos­tal­gia from the unex­pe­ri­enced 80s. The first is a kind of homage for an … Con­tinue read­ing →

The French are undoubt­edly the most self-effacing of pop per­fec­tion­ists. Like a case of asymp­to­matic her­pes, French­ness has a ten­dency to lurk in records, unreg­is­tered, unap­par­ent, some­how spread­ing its geno­type through­out the host until it’s too late to do any­thing … Con­tinue read­ing →

There’s some­thing endear­ing about music that always seems to be on the verge of falling apart. We’re not talk­ing mass destruc­tion, like if Iron Maiden’s infra­struc­tural back­line sud­denly started melt­ing down, but a series of smaller cat­a­stro­phes: the gui­tar goes … Con­tinue read­ing →

It’s one thing to be exper­i­men­tal, quite another to per­form a suc­cess­ful exper­i­ment. The first is a com­pul­sion, a per­son­al­ity quirk like gen­eros­ity or reck­less dri­ving. The sec­ond is some­thing peo­ple other than your mother should pay atten­tion to. Boshra … Con­tinue read­ing →