Pretty cool to still hear new performances of one of Jazz's all-time greats, and this Live LP is quite interesting to listen to, as it is sort of on the brink of what is possibly Coltrane's most important phase in his artistic growth, when he continued to push boundaries and experiment in his music. The recording of this may not be sounding as crisp as one may wish, but it's fine enough to not be bothersome when listening to it, and definitely enough to appreciate the playing on here.

I'm not ... read more

Javelin may be the best project that Sufjan has released since Illinois, to be honest. At least have his album not been as perfect as this since then, and I mean, wow, what an album this is. It's effortlessly beautiful, grand yet intimate, and so very heartbreaking. I don't really know what negative things I can even say much about this project. The songwriting is pretty simple and structurally a lot of these songs are very similar to one another, and the experience of this album may not be as ... read more

Just trying to catch up on some albums that I haven't reviewed yet before I do my end of the year list in a few weeks, and EXCELSIOR is definitely one that took me a little to really form my thoughts on. I was head over heels for Slauson's debut, A Quiet Farwell, in 2019, and never really revisited anything else by them since. Vergangenheitsbewältigung (which I can write without needing to copy-paste because I can speak German) completely passed me by, and now this thing is something that ... read more

What a gorgeous experience. Quite different from what Adrianne Lenker's solo stuff usually is, there isn't any of the guitar-heavy folk artistry here, she instead goes for a full-on piano ballad about the endless pain of yearning, and yet she never loses any amount of that expressive emotion she's known for. There is also a somewhat different approach to the lyricism here, especially her writing on an album like "Songs" had a lot of very surreal and abstract elements to their poetry, ... read more

Sam Cooke's very quickly become one of my absolute favorite singers of all time, especially after hearing his raw and unfiltered talent and amount of energy on his big live record from the Harlem Square Club in 1963, and going to his studio recordings definitely offers a different, less exciting version of Sam Cooke, but an outstanding artist, regardless of that.

This album is sort of a mixed bag for me, I mean, his singing is undeniably phenomenal on pretty much every track, but I wouldn't ... read more

It's like the universe made an album specifically for me. I was never a massive fan of Outkast (not that I didn't like them, what I heard was amazing, I loved Stankonia, I'm just not that familiar with their catalog), but I always knew that André was one of the greatest to ever hold a microphone. Especially his features in the last decade or so confirmed that over and over again, with technical ability that is matched by very few artists in the genre. Well, never did I imagine that he'd ... read more

I've been fascinated by Tim Buckley for pretty much a year now, but everything about his music needed to grow on me for a while, so I'm only now truly getting into him by starting with his debut record, and man what a great debut it is. I may look at it more favorably due to the fact that I know where he'd go from this point onward, but you can already feel glimpses of his true musical ambition and talent here. Let's talk about the actual content of this album though:

The tracklist is short ... read more

At first I was skeptic about this idea. The "last Beatles track" being some random AI bullcrap or something along those lines would've been an obnoxious stain on their legacy, but if you watch the documentary to it, you can really see how it seems to be a labor of love, rather than a last grasp for relevancy and a cash grab. Them taking the tape, and actually being able to have it cleanly separated and getting a George contribution from him prior to his death when they first stared ... read more

What a weird track. Structurally and lyrically, it's all over the place. I'm currently still trying to figure out whether it is a mess that they tried to fix or a well crafted song. Nevertheless, I do appreciate the artistry of both Keemo and Souly on the track, their focus is mainly on exploring this idea of getting as much money as you can while the world is slowly but surely falling apart, with the former talking about his own greed as a cause of his upbringing and the latter expressing his ... read more

I had never heard of Gia Margaret before I listened to this album, I merely found it because I sought out some Ambient releases of our current year and this was one of the higher rated ones. While it may not be the most mind-expanding or technically complex albums that I've heard this year, this was an undeniable surprise to me, considering how absolutely gorgeous the sound of this project is. Many of Gia's pieces have a somber softness to them that reminds me a lot of Japanese Ambient and New ... read more

This album took a bit to get used to, it's eccentrics are certainly an acquired taste that had to sit with me for a while before I understood the appeal, but once I got into this album, there was no holding back my love for it. I mean, it's just such a bizarre, zany and energetic, they're incredibly fast, loud and pretty much the definition of hardcore. It doesn't get much more hardcore than this, probably.
There's interesting mix of aesthetics to be found here, Bad Brains' inclusion of reggae ... read more

I didn't listen to this album prior to today, and I probably won't ever listen to the original version of this LP because I don't care about the NFT-garbage, and if the tracks on the original release are actually better than the ones on here I will just be mad that I won't be able to listen to it, but either way, this new streaming version of Voir Dire is, and I don't say that lightly, incredible, and definitely the best material that Earl has put out since "Some Rap Songs" in 2018. ... read more

The first two singles of this album actually made me sort of excited for this album, and I really had a feeling that we may finally be getting some quality from Drake again, but unfortunately, my feeling was entirely wrong. Sure, For All The Dogs is certainly the best solo album of his since Scorpion, but is that really a high bar to use as a metric? I was a decent fan of Drake when I was like 12 or 13 years old, and If You're Reading This [...] is honestly not just his best but a really great ... read more

I fell in love with Jeff Rosenstock's album "WORRY." back in 2019 or 2020 and just thought that it was a wonderfully emotional and sincere collection of tracks in a genre that usually falls flat on its face with its sincerity; yet, afterwards, I didn't really pay much attention to his work, for whatever reason. I tried a couple of tracks here and there and actually listened to like half of the Ska album that he did, but never got into him much past the aforementioned album. Now, three ... read more

I'm glad this time that we could all agree on this being an exceptional album, even for Mitski standards. I was a staunch defender of her last project "Laurel Hell", an LP which many found to be lackluster and disappointing, and while I'm still in the camp that argues for the album being rather good, I must say that it hasn't really left much of a mark on me after the time since it first came out. It's Synth-Pop and New Wave sensibilities were an interesting (dare I say exciting) step ... 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.)

My impressions of Big Thief were rarely very noteworthy ones, to be honest. I always saw them as very sweet, charming and warm indie folk musicians, the type of music that is lofty on the ears, but never really enters your brain on an artistically ... read more

For some reason, this album never gets tiring. The first time I listened to it a couple of months ago, I thought the album was very pretty, emotional and even darkly sweet to some extent, but I felt as though it was rather shallow in terms of actual content, just sounding good and having good lyrics and not being much more than that. To some extent, it's not more than that. There was never a moment in my subsequent listens where I felt as though I had a revelation about the lyrics or ... read more

Despite never having been a massive Basinski enjoyer, the minimalism on this album just sort of works for me. Maybe it's because I approached this one a bit differently than his Disintegration Loops or Melancholia but it just sort of clicked with me this time. Despite being very gloomy and dark, its textures are some of his most vivid yet. It's also, interestingly enough, very relistenable despite its lack of much variation (no pun intended).

On the right days, this is in contention for being one of my favorite Hip Hop albums of all time. This album is so much fun, the production is so eccentric, rich and colorful, the performances of Posdnuos and Trugoy are amazing, and it's so incredibly ahead of its time. How did they release this in the 80s? This is easily one of the greatest Rap albums of the 20th century, it flows so well, the rapping is tight, the presentation is exciting and inviting, there's really nothing to hate about ... read more

Unfortunately, I couldn't quite get the appeal of it to the extent that I wish I had. It's obviously a magically produced album, compounded of literally so many samples from interesting sources that it's probably an experience in and of itself to search out some of these samples, but despite my admiration of the craft here, nothing on this album really stuck with me when I listened to it a while back. There are gorgeous moments throughout, but I never really got into it, which is sad, because I ... read more