DMA’s – Hills End (I Oh You)
Sigh. Sometimes I do wonder. Here we are, 2016. A rallying cry for black power and girl power stole the show at the Super Bowl. Strong women front bands and speak their minds (case in point – our last album review, our last SOTD). An ace LP from Brood Ma echoes the dystopian reality of […]
Poliça – United Crushers (Mom and Pop)
By Megan Beard An article in The Guardian recently posited the question “where are all the protest songs?” with the inevitable lamentation of an apathetic generation of music makers following suit. Whenever this statement-in-a-question is posed (because, really, it’s a thinly disguised criticism of modern music), it is a puzzling thing to contemplate. Especially considering […]
TEEN – Love Yes (Carpark)
Transformation’s a tricky business. How do you move forward without sacrificing that essential charm or genius that propelled you to the limelight in the first place? Prog rock bands like Genesis and the Moody Blues traded in their mysticism for cultural cache, and crumpled into commoners with synths. Tame Impala followed their example, and traded […]
Good Morning – Glory EP (Solitaire)
By Nick Kennedy To hear Good Morning tell it, Glory – their second EP from Solitaire Records – is about desperation. Not just any desperation though – the kind of desperation so vividly portrayed by the pathetic form of eternal downtrodden failure that is Kirk Van Houten from The Simpsons. Truth be told, I’m not […]
Witching Waves – Crystal Café (HHBTM / Soft Power)
You feel misplaced too, don’t you? Some place was promised for us, for the talents that our teachers adored. This wasn’t supposed to happen. We shouldn’t be the ones stranded in apartments, stuck in the towns we hate, doing the work that no one with dignity would do. Well, then. You can just lie there […]
First Impression: Pete Astor – Spilt Milk (Fortuna POP! / Slumberland)
Oftentimes, when I’m given a list of albums I could review, I’ll pick some names that I’ve never heard before. Now, in a legit music blog like Drowned In Sound, I have to pretend that I know something about the artist, and thus drudge up some “research” listening. But I figure, first impressions count when […]
USA Nails – No Pleasure (Smalltown America)
[I haven’t been gone. You just stopped paying attention.] Fine lines are everywhere you look: under X-acto knives, beside rulers, tied to fishing poles, and also between two opposing concepts that could easily bleed into each other. Here’s one, a hair of a line between brilliance and banality. If you asked USA Nails to walk […]
John Grant – Grey Tickles, Black Pressure (Bella Union)
Some say that the job of good music is to elevate living into something more than survival. Some wish they had lived through the sixties… I wish to be living through John Grant’s career. I’d have seen him play Liverpool if only I’d been brave enough to go alone and I wish I had been. […]
Fay Hallam – Corona (Cargo)
By Matthew Chin-Quee Following a recent collaboration with The Bongolian, Fay Hallam’s Corona offers a softer, more intimate sound to her discography. Being a big enthusiast of Brazilian MPB and Bossa Nova, I appreciate Fay Hallam’s efforts to pay homage to the sound that helped to define popular music of the 1960’s. I am always […]
Static Daydream – s/t (St. Marie)
Y’know, that character I conjured for the Viet Cong review wasn’t a total fiction. That pathetic, miserly anti-ego still rips holes in my skin, still tells me I can’t write whenever I sit down to the keyboard, still gets off on corpse-resting-on-marble-tomb stuff like Clan of Xymox. I know it’s that side of me that […]
