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• Sasha Frere-Jones: Unsound, a Polish electronic-music festival.

New York is practically a non-stop music festival, so it makes sense that the city doesn’t host many big-tent events. In ungenerous moments, New Yorkers may even think that nothing passes them by because everyone plays here. Not so—some musicians just don’t . . ....

• Sasha Frere-Jones: Kate Bush’s license to confuse.

In 2001, the former Sex Pistol John Lydon called the British singer and songwriter Kate Bush “fucking brilliant,” and earlier wrote a song specifically for her to perform (she declined). In 2004, the Atlanta rapper Big Boi told the Observer that Bush was his favorite artist of all . . . (Subscription required.)...

• Sasha Frere-Jones: The delicate art of revivals.

Let’s say you hear James Brown records as a teen-ager, as Gabriel Roth, the leader of the band Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings, did. You may decide that there is no better template for making an entire band play in rhythmic unison, creating motion and a . . ....

• Sasha Frere-Jones: The music of Marianne Faithfull.

There’s no politic way to put it—Marianne Faithfull’s voice is not what it once was. It may have been the hard living (not everyone who hangs with the Stones has their vampire blood) or the illnesses she’s stared down in the last . . ....

• Sasha Frere-Jones: Bill Withers makes no apologies.

In 1972, a year after the release of his first album, “Just As I Am,” Bill Withers performed a song on British television. “Harlem,” the record’s first single, had done little on the charts, but radio d.j.s had picked up on its B-side . . ....

• Sasha Frere-Jones: Testing Their Metal

So you’ve adjusted to the new music economy. You know the big acts have little to gain from making the album of their lives, because only a few of their fans will actually buy it, and most of them will listen to it on terrible-sounding earphones anyway . . ....

• Sasha Frere-Jones: Huun-Huur-Tu’s otherworldly vocals.

Whatever the category of “world music” means, it isn’t much. It’s used, uselessly, to encompass everything from Colombian cumbia to Nigerian highlife to the throat singing of Huun-Huur-Tu, a band from the Republic of Tuva that’s been making spectacularly strange . . . (Subscription required.)...

• Sasha Frere-Jones: The British dubstep duo Nero at (Le) Poisson Rouge.

The English genre known as dubstep has flourished just as its precursors—garage and drum and bass—did: by letting sounds unfold over the generous course of a d.j.’s evening. Pop songs don’t have that kind of spare time, but they’re always . . ....

• Sasha Frere-Jones: Drummer Klaus Dinger’s Krautrock.

At the Primavera Sound festival in Barcelona in May, I heard at least three bands using the sounds of Krautrock, a name that seems condescending but is actually useful. Krautrock’s beat is driving but never heavy, more focussed on trance than explosion. Using constant sixteenth notes on the . . ....

• Sasha Frere-Jones: Snoop Dogg, at the Brooklyn Bowl and Irving Plaza.

It’s easy to think, Oh, that’s enough Snoop Dogg for today. For almost twenty years, the California m.c. has been putting out records, appearing in reality shows, and saying yes to nearly everyone who has asked for a piece of his voice or image. Beyond overexposure . . ....

• Sasha Frere-Jones: Sade’s surprising comeback.

It sounds implausible now, but there was a time when soft jazz was almost radical. This brief moment should be credited largely to the English. In the early eighties, groups like Everything but the Girl and the Style Council developed a hybrid kind of pop that drew from the more . . ....

• Sasha Frere-Jones: PJ Harvey’s desires.

I call it “squinting”—you will have your own term. You’ve chosen a favorite musician, probably in your teen years, and the relationship grows through awkward phases—nautical dress, orchestral arrangements, dodgy collections of poems. Along the way, you find yourself squinting to keep . . ....

• Sasha Frere-Jones: PJ Harvey’s desires.

I call it “squinting”—you will have your own term. You’ve chosen a favorite musician, probably in your teen years, and the relationship grows through awkward phases—nautical dress, orchestral arrangements, dodgy collections of poems. Along the way, you find yourself squinting to keep . . ....

• Sasha Frere-Jones: On the Weekend

Edward Albee’s quote from “The Zoo Story” about the nature of personal progress (“Sometimes it’s necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly”) may be overly familiar, but it remains a . . . (Subscription required.)...

• Sasha Frere-Jones: The Shins’ forthright melodies on “Port of Morrow.”

There is an imperfect but viable analogy to be made between the Shins’ leader and songwriter, James Mercer, and Mark Zuckerberg. Indie rock is James Mercer’s field; the Internet, Zuckerberg’s. Both men are shy and unassuming, without naturally dramatic personalities or excessive charisma. Anyone who . . . (Subscription required.)...

• Sasha Frere-Jones: Sunn O))) at the Brooklyn Masonic Temple.

Sunn O))), an aggressive guitar band, is in the business of low-pitched noise. Really low—guitars normally tuned to E are tuned down to B or A. The band’s founding members, Stephen O’Malley and Greg Anderson, have seen their work described as “drone . . ....

• Sasha Frere-Jones: South Africa’s Die Antwoord.

If authenticity is a vampire threatening to suck the fun out of pop music, the South African band Die Antwoord (“The Answer,” in Afrikaans) is a fistful of garlic. Go to the band’s well-designed Web site and you will find a goofy, vibrant ball of . . ....

• Sasha Frere-Jones: The New Orleans m.c. Big Freedia.

Big Freedia is not an m.c. in the original sense of the acronym. The New Orleans musician, born Freddie Ross, is a faithful practitioner of New Orleans bounce, a thumping but fleet dance music that does not suffer wallflowers. At a Big Freedia show, she—Ross has long identified . . . (Subscription required.)...

• Sasha Frere-Jones: Ted Leo, at South Street Seaport.

Ted Leo, who will turn forty-one on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, has long seemed younger than many of his peers. Give him a year and he’ll usually give you an album; shout out a song at a concert and he can almost always cover it; give . . . (Subscription required.)...

• Sasha Frere-Jones: Sir Richard Bishop on guitar.

Sir Richard Bishop—the honorific is deserved, but was not bestowed by any known state—helped found the band Sun City Girls in the early eighties. “Ethnic-improv” was one description the band approved of, which gives you only a vague sense of the risky, eclectic . . ....

• Sasha Frere-Jones: Sleigh Bells, at Santos Party House and Public Assembly.

In 2008, Derek Miller was looking for a woman to sing the danceable songs he’d been writing since leaving the successful hardcore band Poison the Well. One night, while working at a Brazilian restaurant, he waited on a woman and her daughter. When the subject of Miller&#8217 . . ....

• Sasha Frere-Jones: Robyn’s versatile pop.

Robyn’s new album, “Body Talk Pt. 1,” provides eight handsomely formed, near-perfect pop songs that are embedded with a casual kind of feminism. Robyn, a small, delicate-looking thirty-one-year-old Swede, is remarkably adept at producing pleasurable, accessible pop that, like some kind . . ....

• Sasha Frere-Jones: Music that lives in the headphones of angry teens.

In 1988, a twenty-three-year-old Cleveland resident named Trent Reznor decided to record several demos of his songs. He’d been playing in local bands since 1984, and had learned a fair amount about recording at a local studio named Right Track, where he’d started . . ....

• Sasha Frere-Jones: Rick Ross and the life style of a boss.

A central motif in contemporary hip-hop is rapping about drug dealing by artists who may not actually sell narcotics. Among others, Jay-Z, Clipse, and Young Jeezy have rhymed about a past or present involvement in the trade on the street. It’s typically impossible to determine whether . . ....

• Sasha Frere-Jones: Pavement’s reluctant victory.

Pavement, the elegant, knotty rock band fronted by the guitarist and singer Stephen Malkmus, has just completed an extremely successful reunion tour that included a week of shows in New York. The band hadn’t played live since 1999, and although this tour has generated the kind of excitement . . ....

• Microsoft makes business case for Windows 7

Microsoft trotted out some of its biggest customers on Tuesday to make its case that it still makes sense to spend money on software in a tough economy....

• Sasha Frere-Jones: Budos Band’s new Afrobeat sound.

Slowly and steadily, Staten Island’s Budos Band has found a way out of the existing template of Afrobeat music and created a distinctive hybrid that no longer sounds very much like the past, or their peers. The ten-piece instrumental band, centered on a horn section led by . . . (Subscription required.)...

• Sasha Frere-Jones: Budos Band’s new Afrobeat sound.

Slowly and steadily, Staten Island’s Budos Band has found a way out of the existing template of Afrobeat music and created a distinctive hybrid that no longer sounds very much like the past, or their peers. The ten-piece instrumental band, centered on a horn section led by . . . (Subscription required.)...