By Andrew Perry, eMusic ContributorTo celebrate the new Iggy & The Stooges album Ready To Die, we invited guitarist James Williamson to rifle through eMusic's catalog and talk us through some of his favorite albums. You can read about… more »
By Andrew Perry, eMusic Contributor[To celebrate the release of their 15th studio album, Push The Sky Away, we invited Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds to take control of eMusic's editorial for a week. You can read our exclusive… more »
By Matthew Fritch, eMusic ContributorThe only thing to dislike about this 1972 live recording is its unimaginative title—and even that is an improvement from its previous moniker, American Poet. Whatever you call it, and it's no doubt had many… more »
Metric
By Andrew Parks, eMusic ContributorFirst off — who knew Metric was a Radio City Music Hall kind of band? Not this guy; frankly, I've always preferred Emily Haines spare/spooky solo album (2006's Knives Don't Have Your Back) over the… more »
By Lenny Kaye, eMusic Contributor"Five years stuck on my eyes," sings David Bowie in the title role of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust. "What a surprise." More astonishing is the intervening 40, in which the futuristic world… more »
By Jason Diamond, eMusic ContributorLong before he had dreams of starting the Velvet Underground (and even longer before he wanted to collaborate with Metallica), Lou Reed wanted to be a writer. When he started at Syracuse University in 1960,… more »
By Michelangelo Matos, eMusic ContributorAnyone who'd heard Transformer or Berlin knew Lou Reed had a flair for the dramatic. Anyone who'd heard the Velvet Underground was aware that he'd helped alter the vocabulary of rock and roll guitar without… more »
By Michelangelo Matos, eMusic ContributorOnce punk had reared its head and Lou's old neighborhood, too and he'd answered back with 1978's Street Hassle, Reed tried something a little less rough-and-ready. The Bells, from 1979, is all-over-the-place musically: it even… more »
By Michelangelo Matos, eMusic ContributorFrom 1976, Reed's most straight-up commercial album yet probably ever. The hooks on Rock and Roll Heart come surprisingly easy, though the opening "I Believe in Love" equates "good-time music" and "the Iron Cross" as… more »
By Michelangelo Matos, eMusic ContributorIn which Lou Reed meets his New York anti-doppelganger, Patrick Bateman, in a Totally '80s sweepstakes that's been largely lost to history. In truth, though, it's kind of a kick to hear Reed battling it… more »
By Michelangelo Matos, eMusic ContributorThe middle album of Reed's early-'80s domestic trilogy is the homiest. 1983's Legendary Hearts is far more workaday than its predecessor, The Blue Mask — most albums are, to be fair but it's the workaday… more »
By Michelangelo Matos, eMusic ContributorWow Lou Reed made an album that sounded like this? Well, 1974 was a weird time. So weird that this wildly arranged, horn-laced mlange went Top 10 and still sounds bracing today. Some Reed nuts… more »
By Michelangelo Matos, eMusic ContributorThis is like the opposite of Metal Machine Music: four pieces, two of them in the half-hour range, of music for tai chi and meditation, a practice Reed has followed for a few years. Formally… more »
By Michelangelo Matos, eMusic ContributorLou Reed was always in some sense fighting with his audience for the first 15 years of his career anyway, so of course there was an album devoted to it. There are sharp versions of… more »
By Michelangelo Matos, eMusic ContributorIn which Reed takes the best band he had as a solo artist Robert Quine on guitar, Fred Maher on drums, Fernando Saunders on bass to Verona and Rome in September 1983 and they all… more »
By Michelangelo Matos, eMusic ContributorNo one much liked Reed's 1980 album at the time even uber-fan Lester Bangs didn't have anything good to say about it. But time has been kinder to it than anyone thought, for the simple… more »
By Michelangelo Matos, eMusic ContributorAll of a sudden Lou Reed was middle-aged. He'd gotten married, had a house, was feeling both the weight of his past and lifted from being mired in it. He was happy, but not content… more »
By eMusic Editorial Staff, eMusic ContributorThe only thing ardent music fans seem to enjoy more than watching artists unquestionably succeed is getting to see them fall flat on their faces. It's reassuring to know that our heroes are fallible, even… more »
By Jessica Suarez, eMusic ContributorMaybe you didn't know you wanted two of hard rock and rock rock's most celebrated icons to do an album of disconnected, German Expressionist-influenced, prostitute-channeling bon mots over lumbering riffs and chalk drums, but, well,… more »
By Michelangelo Matos, eMusic ContributorBeing Lou Reed all the time can't be easy. Especially when Lou Reed is, despite his fixed legend as the glowering poetic soul of the New York rock underbelly, a mighty changeable man. Not just… more »
By J. Edward Keyes, Editor-in-ChiefLou Reed's Metal Machine Music belongs in that weird pantheon of albums, like Trout Mask Replica and Skip Spence's Oar, that are heard about more than they are actually heard. At the time of its… more »
