March 18, 2011 – Being partially jaded and partially giddy before the Strokes' free show at Auditorium Shores Stage Thursday night -- their second of the year supporting new album Angles and their first at South By Southwest since a 2001 showcase -- was a reasonable frame of mind. No band's music ever embodied those opposing emotions better, with singer Julian Casablancas' lopsided, slouching swagger alternatively mocking and clinging to his bandmates' exuberant edit of '90s lo-fi indie-rock.

March 14, 2011 – With the tense, negative-space drama of his eponymous debut album haunted by his own palpably vulnerable voice, James Blake has played the coy illusionist, transforming dubstep - perhaps the most doggedly hermetic dance music of the past decade - into a potentially open-ended haven for a new generation of singer-songwriters. Canny trick, sure.

February 18, 2011 – Editor's Note: Like the rest of the world, SPIN was surprised by the Feb. 18 release of King of Limbs, the new studio record from Radiohead, which was supposed to arrive Feb. 19. Our proper review is here, but while the album was still brand new, SPIN music editor Charles Aaron obliged the band's penchant for defying critics with unpredictably immediate release dates by framing the album in nine separate, nearly-Twitter-sized thoughts. Of all bands whose work the Internet has equipped us to respond to instantly, Radiohead is perhaps the most absurdly inappropriate. Everything the Yorke/Greenwood Think Tank produces is about instrumental/studio nuance and fractured/insinuated emotion that's difficult to place or understand or connect with on just a few listens.

December 8, 2010 – LES SAVY FAV, "LET'S GET OUT OF HERE" Flashback to the early-'90s' cash-grab half-light when flannelphobiclosers were desperate for a hang-out-the-car-window rock refrain not burdened with a singer who sounded like he was taking the piss or threatening suicide.

September 14, 2010 – New York and Detroit aren't exactly sister cities. And that fact was brought into stark relief at Monday's Yankee Stadium opener of Jay-Z and Eminem's "Home and Home" concert series -- a triumphal spectacle in front of 50,000-plus headlined by Hova with a cortege of guests, answering September 2's Comerica Park date with Em topping the bill. In the 30-plus years since hip-hop's birth in the Bronx (not far from the abovementioned Luxury Recreational Facility That Derek Jeter Built, which now looms over the previous park's ruins), Detroit has gone from decline to desolation, while New York has left blighted neglect for gentrified empowerment.

September 9, 2010 – When defining the "Song of the Summer," people often refer to the so-called "undeniable" track that at first seems utterly loathsome, but after it's been blasted into the cosmos 10,000 times, we're all supposed to happily recline on our metaphorical beach blankets and submit to being ravaged, again and again and again.

August 2, 2010 – When Spiritualized closed their set Friday night at Radio City Music Hall with an orchestral-rock encore of gospel standard "Oh Happy Day," the venerable Art Deco landmark's roof was there for the raisin'. It was the last song of the last show of the week-long ZYNC from American Express concert series celebrating SPIN's 25th Anniversary, and the 30-plus musicians who filled Radio City's expansive stage -- string and horn sections, choir, plus bandleader Jason "Spaceman" Pierce and sidemen -- could've imbued the song, and the moment, with unequivocal, chest-swelling jubilation. But that's not the denomination of spirituality that Pierce practices.

June 14, 2010 – The That tent was the unofficial home of country music on Sunday, with Jamey Johnson, Kris Kristofferson, and Miranda Lambert going back-to-back-to-back, but Johnson's band was the one of the three that revealed an edge, like they had something to prove. Hitting the stage looking like nervous-energy extras from an episode of Intervention's Meth Mountain, they kept the large gathering spellbound over the next hour and 15 minutes with the sort of gut-punch storytelling, intuitive playing, and grand melodic sweep that country does better than any genre. Early on, Johnson cleared the air with "The High Cost of Living," a philosophical drug tale of a guy who threw his life away to smoke pot in a Southern Baptist church's parking lot (the coke and whores would soon follow).

June 13, 2010 – Perhaps the loftiest praise Jay-Z could receive for Saturday's prodigious gig at Bonnaroo's What stage was that he didn't miss Beyonce (who was spotted on site, but didn't perform) and that he wasn't overshadowed by Stevie Wonder (who'd wowed the crowd on the same stage a couple of hours prior). Rather, Jay made a boisterous case that every major worldwide music festival should probably keep him on retainer as headliner for the foreseeable future.

June 13, 2010 – A friend tells a story of volunteering at a small club in Athens, Ga., in the early days of Kings of Leon, before they were even stars in the U.K., and the band rolled up in their van the afternoon before a show. She went out to ask if there was anything they needed, and one of the boys grabbed a bag of dirty laundry, tossed it at her feet, and walked off into the club without a word.