Katie Presley

Recording Indian Ocean in Memphis' Royal Studios, Frazey Ford says she felt the energy and history of the place coming up through the floor as she sang. The results are tangible: Ford's second solo album comes marinated in the soul tradition inherent to its birthplace, and seasoned liberally by ...

The mosh pit of music criticism has not always been kind to the punk scene. Insiders and outsiders alike have accused punk bands and fans of violence, misogyny and contempt for all things happy-making or comfortable. Ex Hex, the ebullient latest project of D.C. punk staple Mary ...

Pop music is constructed with many of the same base directives as candy, which is why the two are so often compared. Above all, both must feel good to consume, and both must make us want more. Pop meets basic human desires, and thus often gets dismissed as basic itself. ...

Beyoncé stood onstage next to a giant screen emblazoned with the word "FEMINIST." Taylor Swift decided she'd judged feminism too harshly and noted that she'd been taking feminist stances without realizing it all along. It's been heartening and productive to watch two of the world's biggest pop ...

Shara Worden is the kind of artist whose work would be described, were it created on a canvas or mounted as an installation, as "mixed media." It's a tantalizing and maddening phrase in curation — one that implies many forces at play, but leaves the task of decanting each one ...

Karen Orzolek is a rock star by any metric. She's an Oscar-nominated musician and fashion icon who made bowl haircuts cool. Her band, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, made its debut in 2003 with a laser-focused vision of arty garage-punk world domination that hasn't strayed an inch in the decade since. ...

There will always be room in the world for stripped-down, one-singer/one-guitar declarations of loves lost and found, cooed into bedroom microphones and seemingly untethered to a particular place or time. Comfort may lie in tradition, but there's also exhilaration in expansion. On her new album, Blue Dream, Orenda Fink ...

Flannery O'Connor, a writer familiar with the weight of darkness, described the look of a dying woman as one "of a person whose sight has been suddenly restored but who finds the light unbearable." The music of Finnish singer-songwriter Mirel Wagner speaks to a similar knowledge: that light and ...

Traditional Chinese medicine holds that the scales of a pangolin, a small ant-eating mammal, are "cool" and "salty." Eating those scales, the TCM thinking goes, may help expel wind, reduce swelling and boost lactation. But pangolin scales also seem to induce something far less beneficial: rapacity.

A recent

Music is at its most potent when it expands, dissolves, changes and challenges borders. Separations of genre, geography, politics — none are a force more powerful than people getting together to make music in a room. That borderlessness is sewn into the fabric of the self-titled debut album by

Too much sugar is unhealthy — and it's easy, in today's world, to get too much. Sugar is empty calories, it causes decay, it implies a lack of substance, and yet we crave it. But our brains also run on it, and it's critical in energy production. For better and ...

"New wave" is a much more precise descriptor than it gets credit for. Originally a space-filler genre title when "punk" was deemed bad for sales — when bands like Television and Talking Heads were nodding to but branching away from nose-bloodying Sex Pistols mayhem — "new wave" has ...

Lykke Li is a pop star looking to change the pop conversation. The Swedish singer's new third album, I Never Learn, forms the final installment in a conceptual trilogy — and it's extraordinary as both a collection of songs and a tactical re-wiring of her genre's circuit board.

Here, ...

An interesting temporal phenomenon takes place while listening to Diploid Love, the first solo album from Distillers and Spinnerette frontwoman Brody Dalle. The album feels like a time capsule buried in the backyard of the punk and grunge-drenched early '90s and only unearthed today. But precisely because it's ...

When it's nearly impossible to understand what a band is saying, discerning the message means cues have to come from elsewhere. The Syracuse noise-punk group Perfect Pussy issues maybe five easily discernible lines over the course of its frenetic 23-minute debut album, Say Yes to Love, but the band doesn't ...

The word "eccentric" pops up often in descriptions of Annie Clark and the music she performs as St. Vincent. It's a word attached to trailblazers of many kinds. Often though not always, there's a degree of respect wrapped up in the idea of eccentricity — and intrigue, certainly — ...

Language is not universal: Every user, every listener, every usage changes its shape and scope. It ebbs and flows, includes and excludes, goes extinct and re-emerges, changed — that is universal. Angélique Kidjo is, in every sense, a multi-linguist. She speaks four languages fluently, and sings in five. When, ...