HarrySwanny

An album written by a ghost on a front porch swing… by dust bunnies in the attic… by the plastic sleeves of old photo albums; the sparse soundscapes and intimate lyrics emerging from the dark corners of Polaroids.

This is Happening opens with a statement; introspection and deep emotion don’t have a place in dance music. No more “Someone Great”s or “All My Friends”s. That didn’t bring clarity nor did it make for proper club dance fare; Murphy was just “killing it with close inspection.” The answer he finds to his problems instead is to just dance… “Dance Yrself Clean.”

Funnily enough, “Someone Great” and “All My ... read more

A spectacle of intimacy.

Illinois is as small and delicate as sitting in an elementary school class, learning clean and pretty versions of U.S. history, yet large enough to feel like a full tour of the state and dark enough to reconcile with a serial killer and to mourn a love lost to bone cancer. The images it conjures up in my mind are construction paper wall decor and chalkboards, entire cityscapes and ferris wheels, dark basements, childhood photographs, frozen lakes and puffy coats, ... read more

Blue is obviously, unequivocally, Joni’s masterpiece, but Court and Spark, with its jazzy, bouncing, buttery smooth sounds and crisp, spacious, perfectly mixed production, reveals itself to be not as important or vulnerable as Blue but just as good of a demonstration of Joni’s incredible talent. It’s no wonder artists like Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore started their true musical obsessions with Joni.