tinymusiccritic

Respire’s new album Black Line opens with the sound of 2020: a garbage fire crackling in the night. Our collective hopes and dreams rise like embers, glowing briefly only to be extinguished, to disappear into the void.

Perhaps, it’s because Respire are a Canadian DIY collective, but upon hearing “Blight”, the instrumental prologue to the band’s third and arguably most accomplished abum, I was immediately drawn to recall that iconic car on fire with no driver at ... read more

Inter Arma make serious music, of that there is no doubt. Their albums are totems to existential despair, violent invocations of nature’s primal fury, and an apparent attempt to cheerfully undermine the descriptive adequacy of the word, “heavy.”

However, one glance at their socials reveals a band that, refreshingly, doesn’t take itself too seriously. When an interested listener recently queried Music Twitter about where they should start if they were looking to get ... read more

It’s been ten long years since Owen Pallett left behind the fantasy world of 14th Century Spectrum that served as the backdrop of his magnum opus, Heartland. An orchestral art-pop album built around two key Barthesian thereotical conceits - love from the perspective of the loved, and the death of the author - Heartland was the apotheosis of all that Pallett had achieved under his erstwhile Square Enix-baiting guise of Final Fantasy: ambitious enough in its concept, songwriting and ... read more

The music Mike Hadreas has been making as Perfume Genius over the past 10 years has never exactly been short on feeling. One listen to his quiveringly fragile voice on any one of the songs he has released, from his 2010 debut until now, would serve as ample indication that this is an artist who is unafraid of exposing his listeners to the darkest and most intimate recesses of his mind. With precision-engineered songwriting and tastefully restrained musical adornments, he is preternaturally ... read more