The SPIN Interview: Patti Smith
In the three decades since her debut, Patti Smith, rock's poet laureate and subject of a new documentary, found domestic bliss and endured tragic loss. That longevity shocks even her: "When I did Horses, I never expected to make another album."
By David Marchese 08.27.08 12:46 PM
With casual androgyny now as common as rehab and pop-star poetry a recurring joke, it's hard to imagine how strange Patti Smith must've seemed when she exploded out of New York with Horses 33 years ago. Defiant, literary, and rocking, Smith's debut, and the albums that followed, weren't only great pieces of art, they were life-changers. Just ask Michael Stipe or Courtney Love.
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Reverberation: The Beck Sessions
From Switzerland to the Netherlands on what may be his last tour, alt rock's boho alchemist opens up about the road, his family, Scientology, and his next steps.
By John McAlley 08.26.08 2:12 PM
FADE IN: AMSTERDAM, JUNE 30
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Matthew Sweet, 'Sunshine Lies' (Shout! Factory)
Still putting the guitar-centric power into pop that's marginally popular.
By Peter Gerstenzang 08.25.08 2:07 PM
It's not the savviest 2008 career strategy to play immaculately executed '60s and '70s power pop, but few do it better than Matthew Sweet. Yoking fuzz-stoked guitars (credit Television vet Richard Lloyd) to gorgeous melodies derived from the Beatles and Big Star, Sweet serves up his best tunes since Altered Beast.
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Slipknot, 'All Hope Is Gone' (Roadrunner)
Metal's not-so-merry men expand their antisocial growl.
By Aaron Burgess 08.25.08 1:53 PM
Masked or otherwise, Slipknot's members have rarely seen eye to eye creatively, but without that friction, the nine-member band's self-titled 1999 album and 2001's Iowa (the closest death metal has ever gotten to mainstream rock) wouldn't have been so memorably volatile. Still, between 2004's softer, stylistically uneven Vol.
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The Verve, 'Forth' (On Your Own/Megaforce)
If the drugs don't work, why are we still high?
By Mikael Wood 08.25.08 1:43 PM
"There's no need for introductions," Richard Ashcroft announces in "Rather Be," a song from the Verve's first album in more than a decade. And that much is true: though the U.K.
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David Vandervelde, 'Waiting for the Sunrise' (Secretly Canadian)
Savvy glam-pop up-and-comer drifts into a soft-rock sinkhole.
By Andy Beta 08.18.08 4:39 PM
A teen metalcore guitarist turned studio engineer turned glammy multi-instrumentalist (2007's promising The Moonstation House Band), David Vandervelde has already had a whirlwind career by his late 20s.
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