John Payne

A Sunny Day in Glasgow's perplexing pop aesthetic gives them a yearning to pump out dreamy teenbeat chock-full of nagging hooks, which plague the brain and keep the toes a-tapping. The Philly-based ASDG like their tunes with angles out of true, smearing blobs of pop's rich past in a thousand......

English electronic duo Andy Turner and Ed Handley purvey beat-savvy post-techno whose hypnotic melodicism you want to never end. They've been doing Plaid for lo these 25 years now and are still finding new paths to pure sonic bliss, as heard in fine form on their new Reachy Prints (Warp),......

Brooklyn singer-songwriter Van Etten offers a pleasingly painful intimacy on her new Are We There (Jagjaguwar). Delivered with a confidence of vision that she strongly hinted at on her well-received 2012 album, Tramp, these are the songs of a young woman alone, fending for herself on a planet she finds......

Low-key, straightforward and earnest are a few words that might describe Doug Paisley. On his latest record, Strong Feelings (No Quarter), the Toronto singer-songwriter presses the reset button on the country/folk-rock/roots thing with a burnished batch of heartfelt tunes that steer miraculously clear of the saccharine, relying instead on Paisley's......

It's a bit hard to put your finger on The Notwist, but who's complaining? The German pop-rock-electronic - everything else trio's new Close to the Glass (Sub Pop) near-scientifically mishmashes sophisticated audio processing and varied instrumentation to create a supremely toe-tappable set of "pop" tunes, which deserve to be unsullied......

Composer/hobo/inventor Harry Partch (1901-1974) was a defiantly anti-establishment outsider whose chief contribution to the contemporary canon was his lifelong pursuit of challenging ways in which to smash the rigid formalities of the Western 12-tone musical scale. His own 43-tone scale shaped the framework for a multitude of pieces composed for......

The Moody Blues singer-guitarist comes to town toting a bag filled to brimming with indelible tunes from the Moodies' songbook. This rare-ish acoustic outing also spotlights songs from Hayward's solo output, including his recent album Spirits of the Western Sky. Hayward wrote and sang many of The Moody Blues' most......

The ever-challenging Liars have released several volumes of stubbornly abstruse thump/screech/howl, whose most curious aspect is how the hell it snuck its way into the literal-minded world we call "rock" music. Nothing the L.A.-based trio does is without a twist, so it figures that their new album, Mess (Mute), twists......

Perhaps someday John and Yoko's kid won't have to jump through hoops to prove he's got something of his own to say. In fact, Sean Lennon has been doing just that for several years now; his duo with longtime partner Charlotte Kemp Muhl as The Ghost of a Saber Tooth......