gtkrd

A recurrent criticism of pop music is how often it waters down genres in order to reach the wider audience. Sometimes it's fair criticism, sometimes it just ignores that pop — like any genre — has its own idiom. When Rosalía announced Lux as an orchestral, classically inspired concept album with producers ranging from Caroline Shaw to Pharrell Williams, I was excited. I didn’t expect a fully experimental album from a fairly mainstream artist, but the idea was ... read more

As much as I enjoy this kind of commercial, overblown throwback pop rock, it still needs some hint of personality to make it work. In “Bandaids,” Katy delivers a by-the-numbers impression of her One of the Boys era, only without the fun, tongue-in-cheek feel of “I Kissed a Girl” or the earnest quality of her more subdued tracks like “Lost.”

Here, Katy laments her recent divorce from husband Orlando Bloom, trying her best to channel Alanis Morissette but ... read more

Phenomena is one of Argento's weirder movies. It's about Jennifer, an American girl (and also daughter of a famous movie director — not relevant) who is sent to a boarding school in Switzerland as a mysterious serial killer is on the loose, piling up bodies of young girls in the region. By the way: Jennifer also happens to be able to telepathically communicate with insects for some reason, and Donald Pleasence shows up in a wheelchair with a chimpanzee called Inga, who acts as ... read more

So, this one's kinda weird.
This type of cinematic, Requiem-style, faux-classical music is really appealing when done well (think of The Hunchback of Notre Dame’s “Hellfire”), but I'm not really sure that's the case here.

The general idea is interesting. This blend of orchestral music with pop/folk elements has been explored by a few artists recently (Natalia Lafourcade and Lido Pimienta come to mind), and Rosalía seems promising in this lane. The song ... read more