This piece is about SATURATION III, the album released on December 15th from Brockhampton (stylized BROCKHAMPTON). For more on the boy band and their rise to prominence, please see WRVU’s In-Depth Look: Who is BROCKHAMPTON?
Continuing their trend of putting out an album every year, Vulfpeck delivers with their 6th studio album Mr. Finish Line. Featuring 13 different artists throughout the ten-track-long album, the result is a stellar smorgasbord of pure funk-rock heaven that any fan of Vulfpeck’s previous work will be more than happy to bop along to.
The Greatest Gift, Sufjan Stevens’s new mixtape — consisting of outtakes, remixes, and demos from his 2016 studio album Carrie & Lowell — is equal parts haunting and beautiful.
It’s been twenty-seven years since the formation of the seminal Massachusetts metalcore outfit Converge, and twenty-three years since their first album. When bands this heavy and aggressive stay around for…
In the 1970s, prolific musician, composer, and producer Brian Eno helped to define the budding genre of ambient music. Throughout the decades, Eno has continued to deliver quality experimental music,…
Despite some wonderful hedonic highlight tracks, Super Slimey runs into the same issue many projects by prolific trap rappers suffer from: a lack of time and effort. It’s still enjoyable.
Primitive Man is a band that’s always specialized in creating dense, incredibly harsh textures. 2013’s Scorn, the band’s debut full length, is about as sonically oppressive and ugly of an album as you’re likely to find in modern metal, and it introduced the heavy music world to Primitive Man’s unique blend of noise, sludge, death metal, and blackened doom. But believe it or not, Primitive Man just came through with an even uglier and more oppressive release with Caustic.
Going Grey, released October 13th on Fueled by Ramen
I guess I missed the day in class when we learned that “Going Grey” was synonymous with “Selling Out,” but thankfully The Front Bottoms (TFB) caught me up on that lesson with their album release earlier this month. Gone is the TFB known for their trademark gritty sound, lyrical depth, and endearing awkwardness. The new era of TFB is under strict dictatorship by their label, Fueled by Ramen, and it definitely shows in their catchy, over-produced pop-punk album, Going Grey.
King Krule’s The Ooz will be released October 13th.
King Krule’s The Ooz starts out modestly with “Biscuit Town,” leaning more towards the jazzy, hip-hoppy, slow-talking side of his elusive persona than the urban stoner aesthetic he embodies on, say, “Bleak Bake” from his 2011 self-titled album. Its quiet and enticing first track is a good palette cleanser for the rest of the album: The Ooz meanders through a staggering hour and six minutes of pleasantly cohesive yet disparate directions, taking us from peaceful piano to ethereal cacophony and back again. It’s, in fewer words, nothing short of beautiful.
BROCKHAMPTON returned with a bang on their third release, Saturation II, off their own label Question Everything, Inc this past August 25th . The group has a sound as unorthodox as their origin story, the majority of the members having met on a popular Kanye West forum before ever meeting in real life. Coalescing under leader Kevin Abstract and taking up the all-caps moniker BROCKHAMPTON, the group of 15 moved to South Central Los Angeles in 2015 to be the next great American boyband. Following their two previous releases, Saturation II creeps, crawls, and roars its way into your sonic sphere with the youthful energy of a group of 19-23 year old men that have something(s) to say.
The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die (TWIABP) has been a powerful presence in the ’emo’ community since the release of their debut full-length album Whenever, If Ever (2013). Last week, the band released their third album, Always Foreign, a phenomenally composed album overflowing with cynicism, chaos, and an unadulterated sense of vulnerability.
“She’s just trying to reach you,” Protomartyr singer/lyricist Joe Casey chants at the climax of “A Private Understanding,” the opening track on the Detroit post-punkers’ fourth album Relatives in Descent.
Kevin Rhomberg, the Grammy winning singer/songwriter/producer known as Knox Fortune. Photo courtesy of Bryan Allen Lamb.
In the midst of chaos, Knox Fortune offers us a refuge in Paradise with his debut album. The Chicago singer/songwriter/producer is perhaps best well known for his hook on Chance the Rapper’s “All Night,” but on Paradise, he shows he can stand alone in authentic style, production and lyrics.
Moses Sumney’s debut full-length Aromanticism, released Sept 22nd on Jagjagwar, is a shimmery showcase of Sumney’s smooth-as-butter voice that marks an artistic departure from his 2016 EP Lamentations. While the EP revolves around layers of Sumney’s vocals and guitar, his latest release incorporates a much wider color palate, replete with beautiful orchestration and swirling synths. There’s a higher production value, which in turn sacrifices some of the intimacy of his earlier releases which made his music so powerful.
Canadian five-piece Alvvays finally released their second album, Antisocialites on September 8th, under Polyvinyl. Alvvays’ eponymous debut album explored
Freudian, Daniel Caesar’s debut album, released August 25, 2017 on Golden Child Recordings sparked discussion among music fans across all genres. It’s variety of production, a seamless fluctuation of emotion between subtle elegance and bold passion, is reflective of the intricate message the love-ridden Caesar is trying to convey. Throughout the 10 song album, Daniel Caesar spills his heart out about the complexities of love, ranging from despair to pure ecstasy.
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.
