Holly Herndon – Movement (RVNG Intl.)
Movement is an auditory feast. It’s no Bob Dylan but then John Lennon was no Kraftwerk, you know what I mean?
U.S. Girls – Gem (FatCat)
Is it Gem’s frozen nature that makes me feel encased in glass? Or is it my own detachment that keeps me from finding a way in?
Grizzly Bear – Shields (Warp)
Shields is a city album. It functions as a nice urban version of Fleet Foxes — a sound born out of concrete rather than forests, glass instead of rivers, subways instead of trails.
Micachu And The Shapes – Never (Rough Trade)
This is what it feels like to be alive in 2012 — connected to everything and more isolated than ever.
The Bastards Of Fate – Who’s A Fuzzy Buddy (This Will Be Our Summer)
Keep your ears tuned to the small towns. The future of music is living in South Dakota.
Tom Hall – Muted Angels (Complicated Dance Steps)
If this is ambient then it is surly ambient, background music that won’t do as it’s told.
Bon Iver – Bon Iver (Jagjaguwar)
Bon Iver is hazier than you expect. It is lost and narcoticized, simultaneously desperate and asleep.
Pretzel Logic – 4: Absolute (Scritti Politti)
Thus, dear Rikki, I’ve taken to the laws of propositional calculus. Get your think on.
Destroyer – Kaputt (Merge)
Kaputt is a dark city with no easy escape routes. Washed-out horns blow sorrowfully into the night.
5 Music Journalism Clichés Which Should Go Away Forever
1. “(INSERT FEMALE ROCK/POP MUSICIAN’S NAME HERE), THE BAD GIRL OF ROCK…” Description: Virtually every female musician who dyes her hair ‘punk’ colors and/or makes vaguely ‘rebellious’ (or quasi-feminist) pronouncements is saddled with this phrase in music reviews or featured interviews. This travesty of words has been going on since The Slits, and most notoriously [...]
Song of the day – 52: Miu Mau
There’s something very early 80s Eno, or Phillip Glass about all this. Laurie Anderson, even. Doubtless some will dismiss the eerie simplicity and modernity of this music as a joke, or figure it to be ‘not music’. If this is not music then I don’t want to be a music critic. I’m living in the wrong [...]
