Clumsy, but occasionally excellent. Few songs go off without a hitch — an empty bridge here, a weak verse there — but the project as whole shows plenty of promise. She's willing to take risks, and sometimes they pay off on That's Showbiz, Baby!
Before You Break My Heart is one of the best pop songs of the year, what a fantastic sample flip.
Brilliant in spurts. Doesn't necessarily hold up as an entire project but a song like Hapsburg is just indomitable.
Didn't work for me at all. Hayley is a generational vocal talent but you very rarely hear her true voice on this, it's always buried under vocal layers. The songwriting is just consistently boring. Not sure what's happening here.
They're still limping along. It could be a lot worse. I do basically enjoy this
A grand achievement that falters under its own weight. Intricately layered and rich with texture, it's a compelling listen that moves and surprises in equal measure, and clearly it's resonated with a ton of people. For me, though, it's just a tad overindulgent. A few too many layers muddying the mix. The drums are consistently buried, everything sounds a little submerged. And the songwriting is often pretty meandering and distracted, leaving you with a lot of songs that ... read more
It's pretty solid, the instrumentation is often excellent, and most songs do eventually coalesce into something quite arresting, particularly A Dance With Death and Blood Will Have Blood. But it's difficult to get that excited over progressions that feels this obvious (that opener!) and the production on the drums is so bad it took me out of some otherwise hard-hitting moments. You never want to remind your listeners of St. Anger, ever.
Fantastically enjoyable. Punchy, driving, silly; about as much fun as you could expect to have listening to music
There's just very little here.
It's a slight record. Sparse, too, and while the production lends the record an identity apart from anything she's released previously, it also strips Virgin of much at all to get excited about. The songwriting doesn't help, retreading ground as early as the second track and leaning heavily on Lorde's vocals, which have a forceful breathiness to them here that never quite sticks that landing. LOORde is here to SMOke some CIGarETTEs. And ... read more
Fun enough but the verses are ripped straight from Good Luck, Babe and the lyricism feels a bit tired and uninspired this time around. I actually enjoyed the production, so much so that I was surprised to find that Jack had had his hands on it.
I obviously don't know Quedronol, they don't know me, so maybe it's weird how genuinely proud I feel listening to this. Fioratura crept up on me to become my favourite album of 2023, and this record felt like coming home. There's a fullness to all the sounds here that I guess I've been missing. Together is a much brighter record, far more tender, far more yearning. A little longer, too, and maybe every track doesn't feel quite so essential, but, hey, that last ... read more
Caroline's first EP was something of a revelation to me. I don't think I've ever been earlier to discover an artist, so I naturally have somewhat mixed feelings seeing their popularity erupt during the lead up to this record. Good for them, obviously, but it'd be a real shame to see those tiny, home-grown gigs disappear. Listening to this record, though, it's evident that the band harbours no mainstream ambitions. Lucky me, eh?
The sound palettes are broadly the same, ... read more
It's so exciting to discover a talent as singular as Cameron Winter. The way he wrenches out emotion while essentially groaning about nonsense is like rediscovering fire.
A complete disaster. So bad I kept zoning out to ponder what on earth must've been going on in the studio. It's also fascinating. You've got a record slow-roasted in controversy, caked from top to bottom in Win's sleaze, that SEPARATELY happens to be so poorly produced you wonder if Lanois might've been bearing a grudge in secret. Stuck In My Head brings to mind a pigeon trying to take off with a broken wing, or, like, erectile dysfunction. Alien Nation sounds like a ... read more
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