Author: Luca Rojas

I arrived in the desert as ominous clouds overhead wormed their way into the Coachella Valley. A festival worker greeted us with the warning of imminent rain and violent winds, and after our car camping pass registered as “invalid,” we just barely managed to talk our way into the grounds.

Just three months into 2012, and already the year sounds promising for contemporary music, which—barring a few obvious exceptions—felt especially static in 2011. Last year saw the triumph of the solitary musician, armed with only a laptop and probably cloistered in some Brooklyn studio apartment. While the result made for

Coming across a great debut nowadays feels like catching a glimpse of a wild animal. It happens infrequently, but in the moment, finding something so pure and beautiful somehow makes all the inferior music around it worth dealing with. Of course, describing Sleigh Bells’s maniacally loud, amp-grinding growl of guitars—the

“Yonkers” – Tyler The Creator Toward the end of 2010, after years of getting dragged around on a leash by the synthesized excesses of T-Pain and Rihanna’s plastic pop, hip-hop’s future seemed frightfully uncertain. Thankfully, Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy boldly flipped the genre on its head and

It’s a bit of a challenge to parse out where Fleet Foxes fit in the spectrum of contemporary indie music. Nowadays, you’ve got your laptop-toting, 8-bit bedroom projects (Panda Bear, James Blake, tUnE-yArDs), your fuzzed-out surf rock pioneers (No Age, Wavves, Girls, Best Coast), your 80s revivalist synth-pop heroes (Hot

Every year, around the third or fourth week in April, Coachella provides an oasis of sensory delights for those resilient enough to endure the desert’s sweltering temperatures. Music fans from across the country and the world make the pilgrimage to the Inland Empire’s Coachella Valley, dedicating themselves (and their wallets)

This upcoming weekend, the twelfth annual Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival returns again to Indio, California. For those of us resourceful enough to snag a pass in those precious few days before passes sold out—or the especially resourceful few who shelled out upwards of $500 on StubHub or Craigslist—the

“You smoke cigarettes?” she asked. “Yeah,” I replied. “So?” Wait. I started the story all wrong. For you to really understand this exchange between this girl—a first-year who shall remain nameless—and myself, also a first-semester freshman at the time, I need to specify her tone, perhaps with a bit more

Toward the end of 2010, already a fairly healthy year for music releases in general, Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy presented a brilliant, bombastic redefinition of hip-hop and R&B, capping off a decade that saw both genres occasionally mired in uncertainty. At the time, despite the best efforts

In some ways, The Strokes reshaped the way bands rose to fame. From their modest inception in New York City’s prep school scene to their now legendary debut Is This It, The Strokes skated a fine line between cultivating their image as the poster-boys of “New York cool” and breathing