Sometimes pop and rock songs are at their best when the grooves are especially spiral-like or boa-constricted, when melodic ecstasy and sonic claustrophobia combine to create something amazing.

This week, 5ingles explores that idea with five recent jams that aren't trying to make you listen passively.More >>

LeVar Burton hosted Reading Rainbow from the early 1980s to the mid 2000s. Earlier this spring, Burton -- who you may also remember as Geordi La Forge from Star Trek: The Next Generation and its associated films -- announced the impending return of the pioneering bonkers-for-books children's program via his Twitter account. More >>

Won't you give Lee Fields another chance?

Ask yourself: are you over it, or are you going to nurse a grudge? How long are you going to be mad at someone close to you for a perceived sin or sin of omission that ultimately doesn't mean that much? The good news, of course, is that modern pop music has a great deal on hand to fit your mood no matter which side of the forgiveness coin you happen to find yourself on right now. This week, 5ingles offers five songs directly or tangentially related to forgiveness.More >>

A$AP Rocky: "Stink" does not normally rhyme with "bank."

You've been here before, haven't you? Killer chorus, solid hook, great pick-up, inspired singing, and then, bam: lame, bullshit verses. Verses so dire and undercooked that it'd have been better had the singer pulled a reverse-engineered version of Crash Test Dummies' "Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm."

Here are a couple recent examples of what happens when lyricists can't quite get it up.

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Photo by Jimmy Fontaine

This week, 5ingles explores songs that boast connections to mental illness. None of these are quite as stupendous as Suicidal Tendencies' "Institutionalized" or Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy" or Green Day's "Basket Case" or Lil B.'s "Wonton Soup," but the last song on the list comes pretty damn close -- it's liable to drive you mad.More >>

Spring -- in case you were too busy holed up with an Xbox and a case of Five-Hour Energy to notice -- has pretty much sprung. Which is why this is as a good a time as any for rousing, energetic tunes that resonate equally well through ear buds and car stereos and home hi-fi systems, like the latest track from Lissy Trullie (at right).
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This week, 5ingles tiptoes idly through spring tulips and the wild, weird world of drone, sampling conventional and unconventional takes on the form. It is recommended that you pull the shades down, turn off other mechanical devices in your domicile, and savor the sinuous, scabrous sound of overlapping and competing timbres calibrated by musical geniuses infinitely more brilliant than you or I.  More >>

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​This week's edition of 5ingles spotlights songs by artists who seem to be undergoing an identity crisis -- musicians who aren't quite themselves, who apparently woke up a bit off of their game. So these five tunes sound sort of like what you've come to expect from their creators, but not quite, which is somehow more disappointing than a wholesale fail while navigating their usual lanes. More >>

Photo by Erik Hess

Odd Future's OF Tape Vol. 2 does have a few infuriating moments.

​Sometimes a song comes along and you just hate everything about it. Everything is wrong: your sensors are howling, the hair stands up on your neck, and it's some nightmare shit where unless you can somehow get away from or destroy whatever device is causing the awful song to play, your head will explode.

Of course, it's not always that bad. Sometimes it's just the singer who sucks. And then sometimes it's not that the singer sucks, but more that what he or she has to say is reprehensible enough to invalidate in one fell swoop the various efforts of sidemen, producers, engineers, guest rappers, weed carriers, and other enablers.

This week. 5ingles focuses on recent songs that fit that particular description.
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Fela Kuti: For a better day.

​What if a song could change your perception of everything -- how you view yourself, others, the world?

And if a song could accomplish something like that, what sort of statement does that make about your sense of reality, of how mentally tenacious you were to begin with? My original concept for this week's column was "making your own reality, or unmaking someone else's," but I've decided instead to think about how these particular five songs might alter your day. More >>