The first spoken words on Mizan K’s Dark Blue – “Are you looking for somebody?” arrive at the end of a short sequence of thick, rumbling synthesizers, which, along with…
The National’s most recent album, Sleep Well Beast, released September 8, 2017, is characterized by a tracklist that can be compared to a morning commute. “Guilty Party” resembles the melancholy of waking before the sun has risen, a sheet of morning dew still covering the hood of your car. But the sun does rise and the gloom quickly turns into anger and frustration. “Turtleneck” embodies the morning drive itself — the agonizing slow burn of exit after exit, when you begin to tailgate cars just to feel like you’re making progress. Unlike previous albums, where each track transitions from one to the next like the tranquil flow and ebb of a stream, Sleep Well Beast is a complete mishmash.
Neck Deep is one of those bands that never fails to impress. Within the span of five years, they have skyrocketed to an incredible level of fame: between playing main stage at Warped Tour and opening for Blink-182, they have indisputably cemented their name as a pop punk powerhouse. Upon releasing The Peace and The Panic (TP&TP) this past August, their fan base has continued to expand and dote on their favorite British band. While some of the tracks on this album are somewhat questionable in nature, TP&TP is, overall, an absolute jam.
SZA’s Ctrl, released June 9th, 2017 on Top Dawg Entertainment, is widely about the endless personal journey towards understanding and balance in life. SZA, born Solána Rowe, writes about her own personal challenges, blessings and limitations and how they’ve each shaped her ability to maintain her autonomy. Reflecting on the advice and support of her mother and grandmother, provided for listeners in the form of audio clips interspersed throughout the length of the album, SZA navigates tides of uncertainty.
Emerging from a seven-year musical coma, Nana Grizol is back and better than ever with Ursa Minor, another chill indie-folk album offering songs that serve as disillusioned social commentary with compact narratives discussing various personal and societal issues. As their first two albums have demonstrated, Nana Grizol is all about making the world a place more full of love and appreciation; with a message so wholesome, chords so wistful, and lyrics so earnest, this band is damn near impossible to dislike.
2007: a great year for heavy eyeliner, lip piercings, Myspace, and alternative music that nowadays we pretend to be embarrassed of ever liking. Just to make everyone’s hearts feel a nostalgic pang, I’ve decided to compile a list of albums that will be turning 10 this year.
The passing of a new year for most signifies a time of change– well-intentioned resolutions are made as we wave goodbye to the previous 365 days and undergo the ritualistic purging of meticulously catalogued year-end movie, music, and video game lists for a fresh start with a blank slate come January 1st
Little Richard quit rock ‘n roll for Gospel in October 1957. Elvis was drafted in March 1958. Jerry Lee Lewis married his 13 year old cousin and was blacklisted from radio in March of 1958. Buddy Holly died in a plane crash in February 1959. Chuck Berry was arrested in December 1959 for soliciting a prostitute. Thus, rock ‘n roll died, and a vacuum was created in American music in the early 1960’s. The youth simply lost their sound. However, rock ‘n roll and the blues were abroad, being marketed to a foreign audience and growing outside the American musical garden.
Originally, this blog post was going to be a review of Tinashe’s newly released commercial mixtape Nightride. While I quite like the mixtape, something so atrocious happened during its production that it entirely consumed the contents of this post.
Young Thug was removed from “Party Favors”.
In the world of hip-hop, producer mashups are hardly rare. Danger Mouse first made a name for himself in 2004 with The Grey Album, which combined the verses of Jay-Z’s The Black Album with the instrumentals of The Beatles’ The White Album. Tom Caruana did the same with Magical Mystery Tour and Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), deeming it Enter the Magical Mystery Chambers. And the subgenre of plunderphonics revolves around the overlaying of samples over hip-hop verses, leading to classics like Girl Talk’s Night Ripper.
Yes, they do. And for the first time since 2004, they’ve put out a good album.
While on a music-deletion rampage sometime last week, I realized that a lot of the albums I downloaded legally purchased ages ago only had roughly 2 or 3 songs on them that I recognized/ever listened to. I gave some of these albums that I originally didn’t like more of a chance to woo me, and on most accounts I was pleasantly surprised.
Mick Jenkins, the 25 year-old Chicago rapper, has finally done it — just a week ago, after almost a half-dozen mixtapes and EPs going back to 2012, his debut album, The Healing Component, was released by Cinematic Music Group. It’s a record that channels the youth and vigor of modern Chicago rap in the best possible way.
Roosevelt is a one man project by producer/DJ Marius Lauber of Cologne, Germany. He’s been making music for over 3 years, and recently French powerhouse label Greco Roman, picked him up. His debut album, Roosevelt, was released this August.
Well folks, he’s done it again: Keaton Henson has released an album somehow more depressing than his last….. but, like, in a good way.
(Source)
It’s been written to death now, the story of Preoccupations (fka Viet Cong) and their name change. In short – amid a storm of cancelled shows and controversy, Viet Cong had to change their name, so they landed on Preoccupations. What’s clear, though, is that the controversy did nothing to knock them off their course of making fantastic, classically post-punk records.
(Image courtesy of Consequence of Sound)
Since 2011, Teen Suicide, with Maryland singer-songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Sam Ray at the helm, has been fairly consistently lobbing explosive blasts of genre-scattered lo-fi emo/indie pop onto the internet via Bandcamp. Even with all the activity though, and a decent following, the group (mostly the outlet for Ray’s own songs more than a traditional band) “disbanded” in January of 2013, but returned to performing in various capacities by the end of the same year.
Post-rock quartet Explosions in the Sky released their seventh studio album, “The Wilderness” early this April. As a fan and avid listener of their early material, I was skeptical that the group could deliver as engaging and original music as “Those Who Tell the Truth Shall Die, Those Who Tell the Truth Shall Live Forever” or ”The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place.” Their soundtrack material in the interim, such as “Friday Night Lights,” and also tracks off of “All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone,” begin to sound cookie-cutter in their almost melodrama, due only by the group’s early masterful sound.
Stories for Monday is known as The Summer Set album that almost didn’t happen. It had been three years since the band released anything, though the band tried to remain active with the occasional tour during that time. Still, there were a lot of questions about whether or not the band had met its end.
Parquet Courts released Human Performance April 8th, and admittedly, after their last album, I can’t say my expectations were very high. Perhaps that is why Human Performance was so easily lovable—or, perhaps, it was because it was the band’s most innovative album yet, exploring new territory and playing with sounds they hadn’t ever touched before.
Per recommendation from a friend, I recently decided to check out Black Mountain and, more specifically, the band’s fourth studio album, aptly titled IV. Released on Jagjaguwar, the Canadian band’s fourth album truly reminds me why I fell in love with space rock back in high school. The album is jam-filled, spaced-out, and altogether trippy at times, but it also has some really great in-your-face guitar riffs worth mentioning.