album bit to skate by and be eligible as a review: it's great, godrich is a preternaturally good fit for the band, hooks are here... but oh my god this album is structured so weirdly, every song after fitter happier sounds like it's the end so it just drags its feet through good songs for ages

to go off-topic: i've never seen a site with a more truly sick culture that was designed to be seen by the masses than this one. while lord of the flies heavily fictionalised its children becoming ... read more

love how the evil present in hayter's work has gotten more implicit yet somehow pernicious. we don't need spikes in noise, or even a huge amount of distortion or anxious builds; hell, on that first song, it's the recording quality itself that feels evil with how it fades in and out.

not having the digital harshness of a caligula both in the low-end and in the moments where the mix peaks is excellent for reflecting not only the older spirit of the work, but if anything indicating that age is ... read more

a part of what aided rock music in its utter ascendancy to dominance in the late 60s that people seem to underrate is the extent to which lay people and artist-critics were united in their love for it. it may have been perceived poorly by fascists and by some academic composers of the era, but make no mistake: the most forward-thinking rock music of that time was adored by both joe schmoe and the local artisans. whether it was the velvet underground and constituent members, the beach boys, the ... read more

let's put aside varg as a person because conversations about the music get nowhere otherwise; he's a pile of shit and financially endorsing him is an act of moral compromise that you simply don't fucking walk back from.

the music on its own terms is insufferably boring. i've seen people call this trance-like, but when everything except the guitars are played in this amateur of a fashion, i can't get into the groove; the drums stick out too much and the synth leads are stabbing when they show ... read more

easily his worst since who made the sunshine. a project where everyone showed up except westside himself; his rapping is at its worst in years here, with lumbering, awkward flows on especially the trap songs but even on the more traditional griselda cuts. parts of this album sound cheap as hell too; miguel the plug should not have been allowed to have been the most present producer on this thing. the features are split between unnecessary and golden; for every dj drama shouting aimlessly or ... read more

black midi have always been a band who have, in attempting to look forward, ended up looking backward. it's been utterly ruined by idiot-savants who encountered some /mu/core charts and the nurse with wound list and think that means they have any understanding of music in any shape when really they need to grow up and get some friends, but! yea this is a band that has always trailed comparisons. with schlagenheim it was less immediately obvious, with slint, discipline-era crimson, this heat and ... read more

nothing music for misogynists

unnecessary but yknow what? the actual instruments don't sound half bad. pink floyd have a bit of a rep for being audiophiles at their very best and even at their more middling (endless river doesn't bother with any songs but that record sounds sumptuous when you have a really hi-fi set-up) and this does continue that trend. the emphasis on strings and pedal steel at least differentiate it on that front.

that said, waters's voice is gone and i don't want to hear any more from this vatnik piece ... read more

to my ear, great mashups are supposed to elevate all the differently sourced materials in the creation of something new; the ur-example for more meme-focused mashups is the absolutely fucking transcendental combination of kids by mgmt and september by earth, wind and fire which somehow requires no pitch shifting or tempo shift to my ears! it's a combination of two ear worms that is absolutely seamless and creates a beautiful new song that actually manages to embody the emotional context of both ... read more

let's be real; if you're still talking about igor years after it released, you're just the music equivalent of when lily orchard doesn't shut the fuck up about steven universe and game of thrones after YEARS. album's fine but not interesting enough to warrant years of discourse from people who don't know the first thing about music in like. any way.

i do wish this hewed closer to outright djent. there's a lot of fun basic riffs and playing around moving metres from 4 through 7 but the hypermetric goodness that meshuggah perfected is so excellent that they can't be the only band to truly utilise it aside from car bomb come onnnnnnnn

no time for shallow self-hatred that these lyrics portray. billy corgan destroyed this back in the 90s and yeule honestly hits levels of grating vocal performance to match him; cyber meat is particularly heinous. none of which would matter if they had corgan's sheer tunefulness, but nothing here is fit for purpose. i ended up just whistling other melodies (where is my mind and can't get you out of my head specifically) over some of these songs. is this really what passes for impressive here?

the problem with ironic detachment and disingenuousness is that it destroys chances for sincere connection to others. if you're a dipshit ironically and retreat to shadowboxing defense upon any sort of criticisms of your actions, no matter how genuine and conciliatory the attitude, then people will start moving away from you as this pattern persists over time and they realise they're not being engaged with in an honest, approachable fashion. the increasing instrumentalisation of human ... read more

(shoutout timezones for the early listens)

instrumentally their most chaotic in a while. obviously some like peggy and especially el-p stand out and are immediately identifiable, but generally it feels like the more regular collaborators are trying to hit a bit of a wispier sound. less emphasis on thick synths or percussion dominating over everything and more of a focus on woodwinds with help from the live band they employed and playing around with recording fidelities. it most reminded me of ... read more

geez louise feels like the runaway accomplishment here. an achievement to make something that's even adjacent to hyperpop that i like; i think it's the fact that the glassy, chintzy cheap-as-fuck tones that pc music pioneered and everyone else shittily attempted and failed to copy are completely gone here. narrative was also decently easy to parse, with johnny johnny johnny obviously sticking out in that lane. great upgrade from that bizarrely bad ep esp given that i do also like fishmonger

another album that got mauled by melonhead's utter incompetence as a reviewer.

meshuggah have nothing to prove to anyone; they pioneered a whole damn style by themselves and are doing genuinely adventurous things with time, tempo, rhythm, meter and tactus that no one before them did. they are immediately identifiable and have been trying to perfect the studio presentation of what they do.

but after the twin technical milestones of the I ep and catch thirtythree, where their composition skills ... read more

the problem w laufey discourse isn't her (mostly; i do wish that she would get more in on the modern culture if she's going to comply with the marketing of her stuff as jazz as opposed to aestheticising bill evans n ella fitzgerald and leaving it there); it's the idiot pop journalists writing absolute drivel about her that haven't the faintest fucking clue what a jazz is and couldn't account a history of the tradition and culture to save their lives. keep an eye out for a new adam neely video ... read more

...huh.

that's how i reacted to the last jacob collier song, but whereas that was at least a foray into sounds formerly unprecedented for the man, this is more an iteration of previous sounds that i didn't really expect.

collier hasn't been a stranger to folk-adjacent music; the best moments of the eternally cursed-to-mediocrity djesse so far have been those moments, whether it's a well-placed lianne la havas feature or an intricate, beautiful bossa nova moment. and given how much of djesse ... read more

incredibly fucking insulting to treat popcorn like that. a song which birthed electronic music as we know it today and you not only overswing the melody but you put this inane gibberish over it??? and completely erase the folk and marching band influences??? fuck this lmao

genuinely no fucking clue why you'd seek this out as compared to the original version; nas is easily one of the most arrogant MCs going among a pack where one excellent project could inflate an ego like nothing else. and while i won't take away from nas's old writing and his performance here (hell, he takes on az's hook from life's a bitch pretty well), i want to talk about how people interface with classical music and the orchestral world more generally.

there's this assumption that one ... read more