For the love of music
The beautiful aspect of a band like Grizzly Bear’s music is their utter quality of musicianship and how equally balanced it all truly is. Back at the Austin City Limits Festival in 2009 they were at the eye of their supporting tour for the massively successful Veckatimest. After a thirty minute session of torrential downpour the sheets lifted up … [Read more...]
Back when Talking Heads were taking the world by storm, David Byrne and co. ensured that their music was taken as a whole: respective albums that one could embrace and fall in love with. A few twenty years later, St. Vincent’s Annie Clark shares in the same joy and was famously dubbed an art rock musician, just like Byrne always was and is. … [Read more...]
Hey there Emma and Wim – It’s really cool to have the chance to touch base with you both and find out more about your band. Your latest EP Children of the Revulsion (Love the wordplay!) is out now and it seems to be heading in a more laid-back, thematically cohesive direction than your previous EP Gift Horse and debut album Disease comes in … [Read more...]
If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the four years I’ve been working for this webzine, it’s that every burgeoning artist should get the benefit of the doubt. To make a lucrative, successful career in musical performance was a frustratingly volatile pursuit well before file sharing and streaming media changed the game, but even though the … [Read more...]
This Jersey Duo are remarkably familiar but difficult to place all the same. They use space, reverb, and tempo to come off very chillwave, but they don't actually feel mellow; "No One Does Any Good" is actually a very tense sounding song, sounding more Sonic Youth than Neon Indian. Their sound is jangly and ethereal, which will make you rack your … [Read more...]
With pop music – at least that of the radio friendly unit shifter variety – three devices are undeniably ubiquitous: earworm melodies, lyrical inclusion, and conventional song format. Think about it - if your song has a good hook, a direct and universal message, and a strategically placed chorus, it’s a fair bet that people will at least … [Read more...]
Sometimes the birth of new music is so fortuitous that there seems to be a small batch of high quality music still missing. The follow-up, or counterpart if you will, to last year’s critically-acclaimed Pigeons, The January EP is definitely the makings of a progressing, still evolving and growing band. Although there are remnants left in the … [Read more...]
In our lives we rarely come across music that is so shamelessly unconcerned with conventions of genre, that when we do actually hear these types of sounds emanating from our musical devices it deserves at the very least to be heard. I looked in my inbox on Wednesday and I saw the title of an album that sounded more like a secret government project … [Read more...]
Despite its seemingly heavy dependence on the deadpan delivery pioneered by Mark E. Smith of The Fall, Echolocation isn't just a Fall-ripoff band. The band isn't that easy to peg at all, actually. At times heavy and abrasive (as on "Another Thing"), at times pastoral ("Leap of Faith"), and at other times almost dada ("Fish Muzik"), Echolocation … [Read more...]
2007’s Asa Breed saw Matthew Dear reassign the priorities of his solo identity. The funky microhouse and techno minimalism which served to structure his first two solo albums was repurposed to serve as the hooky color of an album filled with pop arrangements. Dear’s vocals moved to the fore, singing verses and choruses like a confident … [Read more...]