Brian Howe

"Suffering?" Jenn Wasner sings at the breathtaking outset of "The Instrument," the first words we hear on Wye Oak’s sui generis new album. "I remember…

"Oh, Jens," the English singer-songwriter Tracey Thorn sighed, with gentle impatience, on her 2010 insta-classic "Oh, the Divorces!", a delectable little gallery of estrangements. "Oh,…

There were lots of remarkable things about Pool, the 2016 album by New York’s Aaron Maine, who records dreamy electropop and electro dreampop…

If you’re just going to put on sheep’s clothing, what’s the point of being a wolf? Among the Canadian bands who took a big bite…

Can you feel it coming? Quickening on the horizon, a rustle of Uggs and shutter shades, skinny jeans and chunky highlights; a murmur of Friendster…

Without making a big thing of it, the French rock band Phoenix has resisted modern fame’s mania for disclosure, instead cultivating an affable inscrutability and…

To be a one-man band, you once needed a harp rack at your mouth, a bass drum on your back, cymbals between your knees, tambourines…

Ambient and house music are just different kinds of eternity, and eternity never goes out of style. That’s one reason why Gas sounds as fresh…

What is a Jens Lekman? It doesn’t come in any of the usual colors or shapes. It bristles with complicated angles and mechanisms. It’s hard…