this sounds like there's a really great album playing in the next room over. i want to go to that room!

I wrote a whole in-depth review of how creative this is and how it blows every hip hop album since Atrocity Exhibition out of the water but I deleted it all because I'm a fucking idiot, but whatever here's essentially what I'm getting at:

JPEGMAFIA has channeled the idea of freeform glitchy hip hop in a way that no other artist has come close to reaching. All My Heroes Are Cornballs is a shotgun blast of intricate sampling/production and untethered creativity, creating an impossibly dense ... read more

I've tried several times to write this review, but can't find a way to share my honest feelings about this album without sounding like a bit of a wiener. Let me put it this way: I really love noise. Like... a LOT. There are few better musical sensations to me than being completely enraptured by the emotional transparency and rawness of a truly good noise album. So, you can only imagine my excitement when I caught wind of this death industrial album people were calling a brutal, terrifying ... read more

Ah, the wild art hoe. Feast your eyes on her grazing in the savannah, speaking about the new AJJ EP despite nothing being within 50 feet of her; the miracle of life. My friends, witness the state of modern indie music in all its majesty. What's this? It seems our art hoe protagonist has come across a coconut lying on the ground, watch as she uses the wing-tip of her thick-rimmed glasses as a tool to break it open. Inside: a copy of Stella Donnelly's Beware of the Dogs! Rejoice! An album of this ... read more

"Venice Bitch" is an ethereal ballad with intricate, lush instrumentation as dense as its emotional content. Fuzzy guitars, soaring strings, and quaint synthesizers gently weave in and out of the mix, crafting an enigmatic dreamscape the world hasn't seen since Fishman's "Long Season". The simple yet sweet lyrics of longing, pain, and lingering on the past further reinforces the foggy, melancholic atmosphere. This is a song that might go down in the ages as a masterpiece, a ... read more

In a subgenre touting such legendary acts as Orchid, pg.99, and Lord Snow, I would definitely say that my favorite "emo-violence" band is Jeromes Dream. Seeing Means More Than Safety is unquestionably the most brutal, energetic, and emotional album I've heard out of the subgenre, and that's saying something for a genre with the name "emo-violence". Jeff Smith's strained, screeching is understandably hard to digest, but they're overflowing with honestly and visceral emotion. ... read more

So, the most you'll hear about this album is about its influences. Car Seat Headrest, The Microphones, Have a Nice Life, Car Seat Headrest, Brave Little Abacus, nouns... Car Seat Headrest. Now that's all fine and dandy, those are some damn good artists so there's nothing horrible about being influenced by them or anything. But who is Weatherday? What makes up the core of Weatherday that isn't their obvious influences? The unfortunate objective-not-at-all-subjective answer is not a lot.

Where ... read more

When I was 13ish, I saw Franz Ferdinand live in Denver. Opening for them was this lady, Cate le Bon, and I was instantly captivated. There was a trance-like quality to her mellow delivery and retro-European aesthetics. Up until I saw this album had dropped, I had pretty much completely forgotten that this lady existed. I'm glad that I was able to rediscover her now, because Reward is easily her most REWARD-ing album yet, one that relishes in subtlety and depth much like my euphoric word play ... read more

Mixing gritty synthy noises with traditional rhythmic African drumming is a really cool idea, but unfortunately Kokoko! falls a little short in that they don't have a lot going on for them aside from that.

Now, I have nothing against albums where every track sounds hella similar. One of my favorite albums is Instruments Disorder, and you can't get much more indistinguishable between tracks than that. When an album has a really solid concept and executes said concept excellently, it makes for a ... read more

Is this what growing up feels like? Is not falling for the spell of Hatchie's generic, uninspired, unexciting songwriting and production the result of some greater internal change? No, probably not, but thinking that makes me feel better about pooping on Hatchie's widely acclaimed new release, Keepsake.

A lot of the appeal I've heard is in this album's ability to harken back to the sounds of 90's shoegaze and bring them into the modern day. However, the cruel reality that nobody wants to admit ... read more

This is about as safe of a Thom album as one can get. Other than "Dawn Chorus" and its gripping lyricism and hypnotic, melancholic bleeps and bloops, there's really not a lot special I can dig up about this album. Frankly, it's hard to sit through the whole thing just because of how safe and boring a lot of this music is. There's nothing here that isn't done exceedingly better by the hundreds of glitchy IDM albums that have come before it (hell, most things done by the man Thom ... read more

The Birdwatchers is a local act back where I'm from, and one that I know very solemn about. I only listened to this release out of a recommendation from a friend, and I'm glad that I came around to it because it makes for a really fun listen. This band takes plenty of obvious influence from the work of Julian Casablancas and Car Seat Headrest, but they do so with a very noisy and very unique approach.

These guys' interest in synth and noise is what really helps them stand out of the crowd. ... read more

Hey, do you guys remember Jamsters? Like those ads that would air at 4 AM with a morbid little CG animal that begged you to text "LOVE" to 850224 so that it can scream at you anytime anyone tried to call you? Well, they formed a musical group called 100 gecs they're fucking PISSED now. Like, oh my god, what did you do? Well, whatever it was, you gotta patch things up because this is not okay by any means.

Or is it?

I have listened to this record lord knows how many times and I'm ... read more

This rendition of Sorrowful Songs has garnered the attention of many for one reason only: Beth Gibbons. This chainsmoking coolgal has noodled her way out of her 1000 year slumber to perform as the soprano vocalist alongside the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra performing Gorecki's masterpiece. Now, other then the social buzz, what's to keep me listening to this one over the famous Dawn Upshaw performance? Plenty of reasons actually. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that Beth Gibbons's ... read more

Alan Moore has this quote about how art is the real world equivalent to magic. The way art manipulates our mode of thought, our feelings, and the way we embrace the world is mystical to say the least. The quote itself is kind of jumbled and wonky hence its exclusion, so I'd rather just reference it to make you think it's far more enchanting (the manipulative nature of art in motion as we speak ;3). This way, I can do more justice to the unfathomably emotional third album of Katie Dey, ... read more

This was probably the surprise of the century. It was only a year or two ago that Jake Paul was releasing songs like "It's Everyday Bro" which were universally panned, and now he comes out with one of the highest received R&B albums of the year! Boy how things really do change.

In a double-twist of events, this wasn't even a new release technically. This album leaked in 2013 and what we have here is simply an official release of it. So Jake Paul was this musically competent this ... read more

I haven't been the keenest about MadGibbs, who for many are a match made in heaven. Truthfully, I haven't listened to a Madlib project in at least a year (it's likely that I have and just didn't know considering that guy is everywhere), so listening to this can maybe qualify as a nostalgia trip to my high school days of listening to Madvillain and Lord Quas.

However, Piñata was never an album that struck me in the same way as Madlib's other projects. Granted, I haven't really delved ... read more

I guess rock isn't dead, yeah?

So, these jobbers sort of came out of nowhere. There was that one live performance on KEXP where they established themselves as that not-Polvo band with the lead singer that really needed to clear his throat, and now all of a sudden here they are making one of the most acclaimed albums of the year thus far. But the best part about all of this is: it's actually worth the hype!

I'm a huge sucker for all the post-punk/post-hardcore music between the late 70's and ... read more

Y'know, it's a weird feeling crying to "I Fucking Hate My Friends, They Don't Understand My Love for the Eds", the 94th song about Kevin from Ed, Edd, and Eddy on an album consisting of 101 songs about Kevin from Ed, Edd, and Eddy. How did I get here? How did an album consisting of 101 songs about Kevin from Ed, Edd, and Eddy elicit such an emotional response out of me?

Dorkcore 101 tells a story about Kevin and The Bikes. This album was recorded from 2015 to 2019 and is just over 4 ... read more

How on God's green earth did she actually manage to do it a second time?

In 2015, the "Call Me Maybe" girl made the best pop album of the decade. You heard that right, time travelers from 2012. Carly Rae Jepsen's album Emotion exploded in art kid and hipster circles and for good reason. While not necessarily pushing the boundaries of music, Emotion brought the fundamentals of synthpop into the modern age and paired it with extraordinary songwriting and dense, punchy production. It ... read more