Spiral Dub - "Spiral Dub" | Album Review
When the band go from making music to trying to make a grander statement -- as the two halves fully represent -- everything clicks into place. The record as this living entity shifts from mostly good to having depth and personality. The layers in that second half find them building on their influences with courageous abandon.
ALBUM OF THE WEEK: Speedy Ortiz - "Rabbit Rabbit"
Sadie Dupuis and her crew are BIG on sonics; they played about fifty different guitars, through over a hundred effects pedals and thirty amps at Rancho de la Luna and Sonic Ranch for Rabbit Rabbit. The band has always had a guitar focus, and the riffs have continuously been hot, but engineer Sarah Tudzin, brought added heat.
GBMystical - "The Mantis" | Album Review
GBMystical was releasing bedroom pop, garage rock, folk rock, and indie throwbacks. Genre, it seems, is as fluid as water, for Munawet. However, by no means would one expect him to set his sights on tried and true sludgy, thrashy, groovy metal for his next project. Yet, that is exactly what The Mantis is - crunchy, pummeling and speeding.
Bueno - "I Was A Thing Of Beauty" | Album Review
Given that it has taken a number of years for this new album to appear, one could read I Was a Thing of Beauty as a make-or-break moment for the band. Clearly, they possess enough patience to wait for songs to come together. Like their esteemed influences, they seem content for the time being to revise their sound as it suits them.
Nate Dionne - "Fantasy" | Album Review
Nate Dionne turns musical conventions into personal diary entries, referencing characters and moments only intimately known by the narrator. The past is oppressed with naivety. A bleak economic landscape looms over the narrative, of personal worth now being dictated by futile lottery tickets and faceless hierarchy, rather than family.
Girl Ray - "Prestige" | Album Review
London indie outfit Girl Ray are back — and from the sound of it, they’re having more fun than ever before. The group recently released their highly-anticipated third full-length offering Prestige, a groovy, disco-pop concept album that serves as a love letter to ballroom culture. The sparkling twelve-track project is a joyous outing from top to bottom.
ALBUM OF THE WEEK: Prewn - "Through The Window"
Locate S,1 - "Wicked Jaw" | Album Review
McKinley Dixon - "Beloved! Paradise! Jazz!?" | Album Review
The album is deeply connected with the work of Toni Morrison, with the first track centering around a passage from the author. This literary center is the primary force that makes this album so rich and rewarding, allowing Dixon to pull his personal experience through Morrison’s canon directly into his songwriting.
Gaadge - "Somewhere Down Below" | Album Review
PYNKIE - "Songies" | Album Review
ALBUM OF THE WEEK: Vangas - "Vangas"
The recent self-titled album by Atlanta band Vangas is a punishing and relentless record. From the first moments of “Chromatic Ascending” to the closing “The Handstand (Pt. 2),” there’s little room to breathe as the band tunnels through a hole of noise for 35 minutes, dragging you along amid some of the year’s most exciting noise rock.
Allegra Krieger - "I Keep My Feet on the Fragile Plane" | Album Review
Black Country, New Road - "Live at Bush Hall" | Album Review
After losing their lead vocalist on the eve of a critically-acclaimed second record, Black Country, New Road emerged with a live album of new material pieced together and tested on the road; the show must go on and all that. The band have ditched much of the postmodern, hyper-referential songwriting on their earlier work in favour of fairy tales, half-remembered dreams and anthropomorphic animals.
Exercise - "Ipso Facto" | Album Review
Truth Cult - "Walk The Wheel" | Album Review
ALBUM OF THE WEEK: Helvetia - "The Beach At The Edge Of The World"
We can’t overstate the importance of Helvetia, a constant favorite for well over a decade. The impact of its sound and style, the structure, finesse (as well as lack of finesse), has left a profound impression on what this era’s psychedelic music can be. The Beach At The Edge Of The World is a prime example of Helvetia at its absolute best.
Mother Tongues - "Love in a Vicious Way" | Album Review
Shalom - "Sublimation" | Album Review
The collaboration of Ryan Hemsworth’s (Quarter-Life Crisis) electronic music specialty and Shalom Obisie-Orlu’s emotional value produced Shalom’s incredibly solid debut album, Sublimation. The two are said to have “worked seamlessly” as the original seven tracks turned into Hemsworth’s encouraged twelve.