Crimson staff writer
Benjamin Naddaff-Hafrey
Latest Content
Phoenix's New Release Emotionally "Bankrupt!"
This album is less personal than some of the group’s more recent releases. Lyrically, the focus is on status-obsessed characters (mostly unattainable women) of the sort one probably meets a lot in the band’s hometown, Versailles, France. The album’s strongest points are its swaggering grooves.
Giving You the Best I've Got
For The Chicken Slacks, Wednesdays have meant the same thing for the past seven years: the day before the Thursday night gig at the Cantab Lounge.
Adele's 'Skyfall' Lives Up to the Legacy of Bond Songs
Friday morning, at 0:07 hours, something very significant happened: Adele released a song that wasn't about a break-up. Actually, it's the theme song to the new James Bond movie, "Skyfall." And it's really good. You can listen to it here.
Mumford & Sons Build a Tower of Cliche and Insincerity
This isn’t a step forward or even an homage: it’s a step backwards into an ideal that’s only ever existed in commercials for Levi’s.
‘Master’ More Than A Cult Classic
Due to Philip Seymour Hoffman and Joaquin Pheoenix as well as a revelatory score, "The Master" is of such high quality that it’s impossible not to get drunk on its strength
Just My Imagination
One day, as I waited for the bus in my mom’s car, I tired of the CD in the drive. When my rummaging turned up no sufficient alternatives, I turned on the radio and cycled, thanks to a well toned habit, to Oldies 103.3. The first song I heard was “Just My Imagination (Running Away with Me)” by The Temptations. Those few minutes were the closest I’ve ever gotten to having a Proustian moment.
A Sort of Homecoming
Some months after the release of “The Joshua Tree” in 1987, U2 received a cassette from its label, Island Records. On it was a gospel recording made in a small brick church on West 124th Street in Harlem of “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” the second song off that album. When the band made its pilgrimage to America—captured on its 1988 album “Rattle and Hum,” along with its eponymous documentary—band members stopped by the church to play the song. And if U2’s gospel sound was first introduced in “Still Haven’t,” it ran so deep that the gospel choir didn’t need to do much searching to find religion in the song’s three chords.
Springsteen Emulates Former Glory In Folk Hero Persona
This is an admirable attempt at modernized Depression-era folk protest music, but between the lazy lyricism and the cluttered production, the song comes across as forced.
Gonna Move Away from Here
In the kitchen, my family had a tall black structure with irregularly placed shelves, one of which held a combination cassette player, radio, and phonograph—sort of a dunce’s corner when it comes to current music technologies. When the weather warmed and school days became a thing of the past, I would become preoccupied with the making of mixtapes for drives to my grandfather’s house in Cape Cod.
The Astral Moment
The night I first understood “Astral Weeks,” I was cold in the dark back seat of my family’s car, looking out the fogged window as we became helplessly lost en route to a Christmas party. As the disc finished and looped back to the beginning, I began to find the music inexplicably appropriate to that moment. “If I ventured in the slipstream,” sings Morrison on the titular first track, “between the viaducts of your dream…could you find me…lay me down in silence easy to be born again?”
Spirit in the Night
One muggy night in mid-July of that summer, I found a soft-focus, black-and-white video of “Racing in the Street” performed live in 1978. The song was, and remains, my favorite of Springsteen’s—the ballad of a man who struggles through life, hoping to find redemption in the late night street races he and his friend Sonny follow across the East Coast.
Top 5 Unreleased Songs from the 'Watch the Throne' Sessions
I’ve heard a lot this year about the music section’s lack of “Watch the Throne” coverage. I would like to ...
Wilco Continues Unexciting Streak on Latest
Despite an overly cautious approach, the album's best tracks are so stellar as to maintain what might seem an otherwise unjustified faith in the group that gave us some of the best music of the new millennium.
Father, Son, Holy Ghost Agree on a Great Album
The new “Father, Son, Holy Ghost” is an absolute masterpiece rife with an unadulterated joy of music; each note on the record is played with a child’s exuberance at learning there is a world, and a whole, expressive language to which there is no limit.
Clear Blue Sky
I was in Cambridge, Mass., in the mouth of a large red slide when I first heard about the attacks, only what I heard was that World War III had begun, and that the war was why we were enjoying an early recess
