Andy Cush

1 week ago | hearingthings.co | Andy Cush |Ryan Dombal |Julianne Escobedo Shepherd |Dylan Green

Hello and welcome to the latest installment of Five Albums, the weekly feature for paid Hearing Things subscribers in which we recommend you the new records from across genres that you need to hear. As music journalists, the question we get most often from friends is how to stay on top of what’s new and cool. This is our attempt to provide a practical answer. It’s Tax Day, which means many of us are staring down a hefty bill and trying not to freak out about how to pay it.

2 weeks ago | hearingthings.co | Andy Cush

Even as the world burns down around us, a glimmer of late-’90s utopianism appears in the air: just a couple weeks after Chicago post-rock giants Tortoise announced their return to new music, the world’s greatest space-rock lounge act has now done the same. Yes, on May 23, Stereolab will release their first new album in 15 years, which comes with a title that might has well have been spit out of a Stereolab album name generator: Instant Holograms on Metal Film.

2 weeks ago | hearingthings.co | Andy Cush

Hello and welcome to the latest installment of Five Albums, the feature for paid Hearing Things subscribers in which we recommend you the new records from across genres that you need to hear each week. As music journalists, the question we get most often from friends is how to stay on top of what’s new and cool. This is our attempt to provide a practical answer.

3 weeks ago | hearingthings.co | Andy Cush

As music journalists, we try to stay on top of new releases, but there are so many of them that sometimes stuff that’s quite worthy of critical attention falls through the cracks. Chuck Roth’s Watergh0st Songs, which came out in January, was one of those albums for me. It’s about as up-my-alley as it could possibly be: a singer-songwriter record that’s also an experimental guitar record, which gives short shrift to neither side of that premise in its explorations of the other.

4 weeks ago | hearingthings.co | Andy Cush

Brian Weitz has a fond memory of Doug Shaw whenever he settles into a venue’s green room. Shaw, a longtime fixture of New York underground music who remains little-known outside of it, is old friends with everyone in Animal Collective, and came along as the opener on a European tour behind Merriweather Post Pavilion, the album that turned their defiantly strange band into an unlikely symbol of indie’s big late-2000s brush with the mainstream.