Max Schmeling’s death at the age of 99 conjures up a rainbow of feelings. Joe Louis’s famous knockout of Schmeling occurred in 1938, right around when my parents were born and exactly a generation before I popped into the world. Schmeling was born in 1905, the same year as my …

The Ella Blame duo combines Michael D. Temple’s hypnotic electronica with Ella Blame’s snaky vocals. Blame’s voice is a startlingly versatile instrument prone to a metallic nasality. Some of Temple’s music is quite pretty, while Blame’s voice most of the time isn’t, and that makes for interesting contrasts. The duo …

Through ignorance or bad advice, very young artists often bite off more than they can chew, applying precociously mastered technical skills to adult material they can’t quite get their souls around. Teenage country singer Blaine Larsen, who sings in a clear, rich baritone that sounds at least a few years …

"Walk A Mile In My Shoes," one of his two Billboard-charting singles, is one of the greatest soul records ever made.

Joining an increasingly extensive and rich body of new roots music is this first release by The Great Unknowns, a quartet of seasoned musicians fronted by singer Becky Warren. Warren, who co-writes the songs with guitarist Michael Palmer, has a voice reminiscent of Lucinda Williams’s, but her tones are easier …

Good songs, good musicians, an excellent CD and great live energy make The Explosion well worthy of carrying on the tradition of their punk forebears.

The fact that soldiers who die in Iraq are called heroes may bug Ted Rall, but no matter how you look at it, they died for their country. Whether we like what the country is - or has become - is the real question.

A recent discussion on Blogcritics along with this New York Times article about the separation of church and state in Italy have prompted the following thoughts. I live in Brooklyn, the Borough of Churches. There’s practically a church on every block, and where there isn’t a church, there’s a synagogue …

Eternal life may be changing from a death-defying fantasy to something more mundane, as this new book reveals...

I hear an awful lot of cookie-cutter singer-songwriters, so I have to be careful not to overpraise those who merely don't suck.