ngawamoyin

Having spent more than half a year at #1 on the Country Albums chart, This One's for You is unquestionably the biggest country album of 2019, and is the longest-reigning #1 album on the country charts for any male artist. The album has been supported by a half-dozen singles, all of which reached number one in country airplay. While This One's for You isn't exactly traditional, it does cling more to country music's traditions than a lot of what's on country radio, mostly using real drums instead ... read more

Ministry released their first record, With Sympathy, in 1983. It was a fairly standard synthpop record, with the songs even being sung in a phony British accent to imitate other more successful bands like the Human League, Depeche Mode, and Soft Cell. Alain Jourgenson, the band's only consistent member, was ashamed of the record, claiming that the record label had forced the style on him and vowing to destroy every physical copy. After the release of With Sympathy, Jourgenson immediately began ... read more

Brown Book is a pioneering album in the neofolk genre, a contemporary folk subgenre that comes out of the industrial music scene. You can hear in this album that the sound is still developing; there's still noticeable industrial and post-punk influence, the kinds of music Death in June started making. The genre would later develop to produce a few masterpieces in the early 90s, including DiJ's But What Ends When the Symbols Shatter and especially Current 93's Thunder Perfect Mind. But this is ... read more

Scarlet's Walk is a strangely overlooked album. Despite being Tori Amos's last album to go gold, it is little talked about except amongst Tori's fanbase. To the unconverted, Scarlet's Walk is where the wheels fell off: where Tori began to release records that were too long, too overthought, and too MOR in their production. It is true that Scarlet's Walk is long at over 70 minutes. It is highly ambitious in concept, arguably more ambitious than any of her previous albums. And it does mark a ... read more