No Such Place is an album I have come back to over and over again this past decade. Its fusion of varied production (and producers), Southern Gothic story telling and haunting lyrics have caused me to examine its face closely and in different detail over the years, re-reading its specifics and yielding different results each [...]

The National craft mood music. In the span of four albums and an EP they have created a niche of elegant and dark atmospheric rock bolstered by vocalists Matt Berninger’s languid baritone and everyman poetics. These are the 21st century blues for those of us who grew up in the ‘80s. A world view framed [...]

I’m not going to qualify anything here—it’s tempting to get into a semantic argument about the differences between “best” and “favorite” records to explain why I think that twelve old-time rock ‘n’ roll songs spoke-sung by a broken Catholic is better than anything this decade by Radiohead, by Animal Collective, by Wilco (as much as [...]