Freedom is not a “challenging” listen, but choruses or hummable melodies are few; rather, the album progresses at a loping, steady pace, as if somehow delivered by natural rhythm.
This isn’t new; it sounds familiar, a deeper foray into Narkopop’s haunting rhythms. but Rausch removes itself further from the arboreal muses of Narkopop or, at least, subverts them.
Wide Awake! is the album in which America’s most consistent punk band once again distill their myriad influences, this time with a whole new list of reasons why their minds never push the brakes.
The self-mythologizing that Ka composes on Orpheus vs the Sirens constitutes a minoritarian epic that resounds with the properly poetic catharsis that might purge the constraints from a life’s definition.
On the nose with invisible fingers, In a Poem Unlimited is as lush, disgusted, and dour as the previous album, but with less obscuring vaporous swirl. The tone is more one of defiant, soaring majesty and poison-laced confection, underscored with lyrics of damnation and earnest imparting.
Seasoned to perfection, the album documents Roc Marciano cementing his legacy as an MC, producer, and influence in control of his ends — that is, not only of his money, but of his destiny. Behold a Dark Horse.
After Bloom’s widescreen production almost pushed them into stadium territory, Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally have continued to amp up the melodies while retaining the band’s ASMR qualities, arguably culminating with Depression Cherry. While the latter wasn’t completely adored at a critical level, to me, it felt like they’d at least hit on the blueprint for a masterpiece. On 7, the Baltimore duo presents us with the completed architecture.
In spite of its blurry visage, Stage 4 finds The Caretaker rejecting nothingness, collapsing the fear of death into an all-encompassing object of life hurtling through the chaotic unknown. Even in the face of obliterating dissolve, Leyland Kirby finds music.
Musically, the album’s apparent incompleteness — the always dissolving lack of coherence, the mosaic of multiple voices, the chance and chaos by which the songs were arranged — abides by the peripheral pull of curiosity.
soil is a crucial psalm; crucial for its queerness, crucial for its catholicism, its pagan roots protruding into sidewalks, crucial for its purity of heart, crucial for how it avoids imperative.
Another Life, chameleonic as it is demonic, aggregates its influences and kaleidoscopes them into earworming shards of electronic puncta, a diabolical mimesis whose loathsome grin belies its functionality as dance music.
Be the Cowboy is about capriciousness, denying the contrivances of beauty in some ways while bending to its standards in others. She’s walking the divide between love and heartache, between dejection and fury. But Miyawaki has the talent to straddle that line with poise and aplomb; she’s the geyser and also the slow dancer.
The first time I listened to Now Only, it was raining and I cried for 10 minutes; after it ended, like a body after an exorcism, I felt lighter, and when I looked out of my window, into a black night, there were no crows or rainbows or signs, but inside of my room, inside of my body light gleamed.
Tirzah’s Devotion, these 14 numeral moments, sketch a way toward communicating loving better.
For better or for worse, Charli XCX is embracing maturity on her fourth mixtape ... And though she may not find what she’s looking for anytime soon, Charli XCX, on Pop 2, is at least looking down a new path.
For an artist who’s demonstrated a remarkable ability to evoke moods of melancholy and fear in his music, Safe in the Hands of Love thrives on its intensity and excitement, revealing a side of Yves Tumor that we’ve never seen blossom so fully like this before.