Album Reviews
Yeasayer and Warpaint Besiege the Natural History Museum
Yeasayer and Warpaint Besiege the Natural History Museum, 2.7.10
Cold War Kids’ Lukewarm Friday Night at the Wiltern
Cold War Kids’ Lukewarm Friday Night at the Wiltern
Yahowa 13 – Magnificence of Memory
Yahowa 13 is a mindbending pleasure whether you’re tuning in or dropping out.
Foreign Born – Person to Person
Foreign Born’s music, as their name implies, travels. On Person to Person, the band takes musical traditions from around the world, wraps them up in indie-pop, and delivers them neatly packaged as extremely catchy summer songs. We’re taken to the new orleans bayous, south African townships, and the beaches of Lagos. The stomp and sway [...]
Isis- Wavering Radiant
Metalheads employ the finest tools of musical vivisection, but the system breaks down with Isis, the prog-metal visionaries who stretch the boundaries of categorization.
P.J. Harvey & John Parish – A Woman a Man Walked By
Polly Jean Harvey has carved out a lot of dark spaces on her albums. From the evocative and harsh Riot Grrl-ish lashings of her early-to-mid ’90s works Dry and To Bring You My Love, Harvey has stomped headfirst into the cock-heavy world of rock ’n’ roll.
Black Math Horseman – Wyllt
Apocalyptic visions have never sounded as alluring as on Black Math Horseman’s debut album, Wyllt.
Moderat – S/T
Moderat is the marriage of two musical worlds fused together along with the precision of digital and the warmth of analog.
Dirty Projectors – Bitte Orca
Dirty Projectors are entirely unpredictable leading listeners through forests of strings and valleys of distorted bass guitar, and into psychedelic crazy pop.
Local Customs: Downriver Revival
Downriver Revival showcases the double lives that hid in the troubled town of Ecorse, Michigan; where a church secretary could wail out the blues at night, or a mechanic’s hands could crawl across the keys of a Hammond B-3 organ.
Two Fingers – S/T
Two Fingers takes on the template of late 90’s era electronica (primarily drum ‘n’ bass and trip hop) and cross-pollinates it with hip hop aesthetic, creating a sonic middle ground palatable to enthusiasts of either genre.
Crystal Antlers – Tentacles
Crystal Antlers push LA rock into a new direction that celebrates the soul and the clamor of four decades of Southern California sound.
Amadou et Mariam – Welcome to Mali
Bagayoko and Mariam Doumbia live in a world where sound is everything. They met as teenagers at the Institute for the Young Blind in the West African nation of Mali, where Doumbia cultivated her blithe, songbird voice and Bagayoko developed his playful guitar plucking. They fell in love soon after, and, in 1980, they married and became known as “the blind couple from Mali.”
Death – …For the Whole World to See
In 1971, brothers David, Bobby, and Dannis Hackney cooked up Death in their Detroit garage. Little did they know that more than three decades later, their efforts would become the stuff of music lore. Death’s album, set for release thirty-eight years after the band’s birth, is now a must-have for proto-punk enthusiasts. (For the metalhead [...]
These Are Powers – All Aboard Future
If the avant-garde is dead, then These Are Powers plays in its graveyard. These ghostly dancescapes, although not exactly avant-garde, certainly toe the line of experimentalism, if the term actually means anything anymore. After all, “experimental” music (as many bands choose to label their sounds on MySpace) is a nebulous catchall for music that breaks [...]
Animal Collective – Merriweather Post Pavilion
An Animal Collective album usually takes some time. Call your secretary, cancel your afternoon meetings. Take a rain check for that dinner date, tell your girl you’re staying in. Animal Collective albums hijack your life. But on Merriweather Post Pavilion the collective offers its most accessible release to date. The bouncing beats of “My Girls” [...]
The Drones – Havilah
The Drones tumble into darkened realms, swaggering with delightfully sloppy guitar and tumbling drums, as the record brims with the urgency of a confession from the gallows.
Dälek – Gutter Tactics
My Bloody Valentine would have no analogue in the rap world if it weren’t for Dälek.
Mr Oizo – Lambs Anger
If Justice built the house of French dance thrash, Mr. Oizo tears it down on Lambs Anger. Deconstruction is nothing new for France’s l’enfant dancible.
Juana Molina- Un Día
…within the constrained rhythms of her music—fragile micro beats seemingly sewn together with spiderwebs—she reveals the rhythmic skeleton of South America at her core.
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