Joel Meyer

Here's a slideshow of Soundcheck's recent in-studio guests, including jazz trio the New Standards, rock group the Heartless Bastards, art-electronic duo High Places, and more. (Click here for the full-screen slideshow, with information about each of these guests.)

During today's installment of our Seven Sins series, we heard how the sin of sloth – has a lot to do with melancholy. And few bands do melancholy quite like the British group Tindersticks.

Starting ...

In the latest installment of our Friday series, “Seven Sins: The Deadly Medley,” we examine sloth – a “deadly sin” that walks the fine line between laziness and melancholy. Our guest Jody Rosen shares this list.

Harry Fields, "Oh! How I Hate to Get Up ...

This week’s picks bring a French accent to the Arizona desert, a historic look at Jerusalem through music, and an accordion virtuoso from Argentina. French-born, and living in the US since her teens, Marianne Dissard is a charter member ...

In the film 'Apocalypse Now,' two characters learn the hard way that you 'never get out of the boat.' But today the Soundcheck Smackdown dares to venture into a tiger-filled jungle with a debate over a cultural icon who's pretty beloved in this neck of the woods.

(Learn why ...

Slideshow: Calypso Rose at WNYC

Calypso superstar McArtha Lewis, better known as Calypso Rose, composed her first calypso after witnessing a man stealing the glasses off of a woman’s face in Trinidad, warning people from her native country ...

The band Of Montreal recently visited Soundcheck to play live and to talk about their latest album, "Skeletal Lamping." (Check out the full segment here.) After the broadcast, frontman Kevin Barnes and guitarist Brian Poole talked about their favorite on-stage costumes -- and Kevin revealed a secret about shaving ...

Music critic Jody Rosen of Slate.com visits Soundcheck today to share his list of the best pop and rock music of 2008. Here are his lists for best albums and best singles [listen to the episode here]: Albums 1. Girl Talk, Feed the Animals 2. Lil Wayne, Tha ...

I’d give it 8/10. Every song is awesome except “Shackler’s Revenge” and “Catcher in the Rye.” “Shackler’s Revenge” has a bit too much of an industrial and nu-metal influence, and it really bugs me. “Catcher in the Rye” looks promising from the name but ends up being a really boring ...

It was never going to be great. Just like Brian Wilson's "Smile", somewhere around the 5-10 year mark the potential for this album to actually deliver was done. When you spend that much time in the studio tinkering on something, one thing is for sure. It's going to be a ...

It's not as terrible as I thought it would be. Axl sounds fantastic. "Better" is probably his best vocal work ever (even though it's heavily edited). "IRS" has very impressive falsetto work. "Chinese Democracy" rocks hard, though simplistically, and has a gutteral scream that totally gets you hyped to hear ...

It took him 15 years to make the album, but it sounds more like all the music that has come into popular play in the past 5 years or so. The production, the "wall of sound" that I always hear now, and the effects on his voice all make the ...

Alright, it's been a long time. Everybody gets it, but that really has nothing to do with the album. If all everyone does is focus on that then what's the point really? A review is about the music so let's cut to that. The track list is as follows: 1. ...

Fifteen years. Thirteen million dollars. One Axl Rose. This Sunday, the once-mythical Guns ‘n’ Roses album “Chinese Democracy” will finally see the light of day. (Well, the official version. It leaked like an antique dinghy.)

But was it worth ...

Check out today's Soundcheck Smackdown on cellphones at concerts, featuring pop music critic Thor Christensen of the Dallas Morning News and Eliot Van Buskirk of Wired.com's 'Listening Post.'

Thor and several listeners pointed out the poor quality of many images and sounds captured at live concerts. Ray from Greenpoint sent ...

I don’t know what kind of trouble I’m getting myself into by admitting this, but here goes: I used to download songs from LimeWire. A lot of them. No, seriously: if I revealed the actual amount of songs I grabbed, it would make your hard drive blush.

I spent the ...

John Lennon's lyrics for Give Peace a Chance are to go under the hammer at an auction at Christie's this summer. The lyrics were handed to comedy writer Gail Renard, who was then 16, at Lennon and Yoko Ono's Montreal 'bed-in' in ...

New York, NY —

A Lower East Side nightclub has earned a reputation for nurturing young singer songwriters. It’s where many of them get their first crack at an audience -- and at the tip bucket. Reporter Joel Meyer visited the Living Room last weekend as it celebrated its ...

Check out a slide show from Soundcheck's trip to Austin for South by Southwest!

Friday night was my last night of SXSW. I'd seen a great collection of bands: Crystal Castles, Santogold, MGMT, Land of Talk, and Cloud Cult. And with 10 minutes before my rendezvous with my Austin fixer, Vic, and ...