MU_2 is unfortunately not as good as its predecessor, or at least not as consistent overall, but I still think it is a sequel worthy of its title. In contrast to the first album Alicks released in 2022 (that being Maybe), MU_2 completely discards the IDM ideas to make another project consisting out of mostly ambient pieces and tape-music, which is the field he operates best in, so I was excited and happy to listen to it. As I said, where on MU_1 Alicks made every second count, here it feels as ... read more

I don't often listen to music in languages I don't speak since lyrics are something I find very important (and my understanding of Spanish is very limited), so this was a lovely surprise. The songwriting here (merely talking about melodies, structure, etc., not lyrics) is very compelling throughout and the minimalism of the entire album brings a certain intimacy to the experience. The sparse instrumentation forces the listener to focus primarily on her vocals and nothing else, and since we get ... read more

I've never been a huge fan of Black midi; their music is technically very well made and I admire them, but their chaotic insanity, erratic structures and goofy-yet-intense attitude towards music is just a little bit too all-over-the-place and nerdy for my tastes, but nevertheless I gave this album a chance since I hadn't heard enough music of this year yet, and I actually really liked this one. It's their shortest effort so far, and the other albums all seemed a little bit more crazy than this ... read more

I remember the first time I listened to Brian Eno's work; it was two or three years ago and I put on Music For Airports by him, possibly the most acclaimed Ambient record of all time. Well, I did... not love it. It's not bad, don't get me wrong, but in terms of other Ambient albums I'd heard before, this one was just massively underwhelming and boring to me, despite its subtle beauty. Yet, the more I continue to listen to Eno's ambient catalog, the more I fall in love with it, and so far I ... read more

I've always admired a lot of Metro Boomin's production due to the fact that he can make even the most boring artists sound decent on his beats. Since the people he works with (and a lot of the people featured on this album) are far from remarkable performers, a lot of the time, his production carries the tracks past the finish line rather than going with them, but that's a compliment, I guess. With Heroes and Villains, Metro Boomin was able to create a very consistent and sonically cohesive ... read more

I first tried to listen to this album around a year ago, and I honestly didn't really get the hype. I thought it was kind of only simple and dreamy 80s-schlock (even though it came out in 1990) that relied too heavily on reverb to create an atmosphere. While I love the Shoegaze genre for its textures and atmosphere, the Dream Pop genre was something that I could never get into as much as Shoegaze, even though they are both two sides of the same coin. There are exceptions, obviously, but to put ... read more

Watched the film, so I can't really say how great the music is on its own, but throughout watching it, I often found myself overwhelmed by the greatness of Philip Glass and underwhelmed by the imagery. Not to say I didn't enjoy it, I loved it a lot, but the music stands out so much more to me, which is why I am convinced to already rate it here. Such dense and impactful compositions that can shake you to your very core. I'm no expert in classical music, nor minimalism, but this is absolutely ... read more

Les Rallizes Dénudés is a band that was mostly known as a group with loudly overblown audio recordings and bootlegs that added a layer of obscurity and mystery to their presence. A noisy Japanese psychedelic rock band from the 60s and 70s with a French name that sometimes had songs that were longer than 30 or 40 minutes and never recorded or released any studio quality albums? Sounds pretty obscure to me, yet they somehow garnered a rather sizable fan base for what they are ... read more

The Zombies' Odessey and Oracle stands in an interesting spot in history, being a part of the popularization of psychedelia in music, but obviously nowhere near as important as the "big two" of the time: The Beatles and The Beach Boys. Funnily enough, The Zombies' sound on this album is almost a fusion between both of these bands; they have the sweet vocal harmonies and catchy-but-precise songwriting akin to a Brian Wilson, but never cease to have a bit of that oomph, heaviness or ... read more

Alicks' Maybe finds Alex Lasater at a weird spot in his career, as he is not only trying to follow up what might have been his most expansive and ambitious undertaking yet (that being 2020's The Reaper), but it is also a crucial point in time for him where is is actively trying to distance himself from his older material. After the release of his second project in 2022, his sequel to MU_1 with the innovative title "MU_2", Lasater announced his eventual departure from his most popular ... read more

God, what a gorgeous experience this album is every single time you revisit it. It took me a while to truly appreciate Björk's Vespertine, but I've come to the realization that this is possibly the greatest Art Pop album of all time, and if it isn't, then there's very, very few competitors to keep up with her. Vespertine takes the orchestral sounds of her last album, Homogenic, and continues to fuse them with electronic, sometimes IDM-like sound play, but instead of these very harsh, ... read more

(A lot of people do perfect score purges, where they downrate albums they gave a 100/100 to, but what I'm doing right now is the reverse of that, imma be more charitable and give albums 100/100 that I originally didn't believe to be perfect.)

[ORIGINAL REVIEW]
It's honestly quite hard to believe how genuinely phenomenal John Coltrane's Ascension is. It's 40 minutes of pure chaos while still feeling extremely contained and controlled within its own orchestration. There's not a single dull ... read more

While undeniably well-performed and influential, Head Hunters by Herbie Hancock feels like it lacks something for me. Maybe Jazz-Funk just isn't entirely one of my preferred sub-genres, but still hear glimpses of greatness that I quite appreciate throughout this thing. I adored a lot of Hancock's contributions to Miles Davis' A Tribute to Jack Johnson, so I was eager to check out some of his own work, but this one left me rather disappointed. It's not that it's a bad project, in fact, it's ... read more

Alice Contrane's Journey in Satchidananda is widely considered one of the greatest records ever released, and it's not surprising at all how this album has stood the test of time for the past fifty years. The sound is not necessarily fresh anymore, but it is timelessly unique and exciting no matter where or when you listen to it. It truly felt like a journey, and a with such adventurous sounds, one could argue that this is one of the important jazz releases - if not the most important jazz ... read more

"Streetlands" is the second EP that Burial released this year after he gave us his "Antidawn"-EP in January, and I was actually one of the fewer people that really enjoyed that project a lot when it came out. It seems like a lot of people just don't really enjoy Burial's subtler music, and I guess that's fine, considering that it's nearly impossible for him to ever create anything that would get as much acclaim as his legendary album "Untrue", but ... read more

When we were much younger, me and my friends used to do scary horror challenges on Halloween, and I remember one of them being locking yourself in a dark room while listening to scary songs, so we looked them up and one we found was Frankie Teardrop, and we listened to that. Back in the day, I really had no idea about music production and anything related to that, so I just wrote it off as a track that was like a bad horror movie that relies on jump scares and thought it was really dumb, which ... read more

You know it's a Bob Dylan song if you're halfway through and already at verse 8.

While it's still a great record, Dylan's unbelievable 60s-run took a little dip in quality with the release of Another Side of Bob Dylan, but thankfully, the quality skyrocketed back up again with his 1965-album Bringing It All Back Home, the album that would not only be known as the project where Dylan would go electric for the first time, but also the one that preceded his most definitive and most iconic ... read more

One of those massive classics that I just don't entirely get. Pretty much the entire album sounds gorgeous, the production is fantastic and every tune on here is solid at worst, I just don't get much more out of it. The two hits on here (Dreams and The Chain) are some of the best Rock tracks of the 70s, but there are many songs on here that leave me wanting to get a bit more out of it. That's not really a big criticism, but rather a problem of personal preference, but I still cannot say that I ... read more

An absolute improvement upon Post, and a very cohesive and compelling record throughout. The colorful and eclectic sonic palette of the pop-oriented Post is completely discarded to create a record filled with consistently very cold, dark and heavy Glitch- and Art-Pop tracks, and it works wonders for both her songwriting and her voice. Many moments on this album feel larger than life, and the emotions expressed feel genuine yet also incredibly distant. The mixture of hard-hitting electronic ... read more

Coleman's The Shape of Jazz to Come is one of my favorite albums ever and up there as one of my absolute Jazz favorites, so I was pretty excited to check out more of his work, and the genre-defining "Free Jazz" is definitely as much of an intense and interesting experience as his previous records. Sonically, it consists out of mostly the same instrumental palette, but what Coleman decided to do was take the free, chaotic and improvisational nature of The Shape of Jazz to Come and turn ... read more