The Underground Sound of Emerson College
“Never Lose That Feeling” ensued and Adam Franklin’s tone, a perfect blend of indifference and longing, carried the band into the home stretch. Guitars screeched in voltage-heavy arpeggiated riffs as Swervedriver played the last of their heavy hitters—“Duel.” For men pushing 60, the set was an impressively unrelenting flow of energy up until its last moments. It was the crowd who couldn’t catch up.
“The One to Wait” by CCFX The summer I wandered with and without a destination, returned to my childhood home, scratched at persistent mosquito bites I thought would never heal, tried out sun-printing and beamed at the results, tearfully watched snow dust the Swiss alps, dipped my feet into various bodies of water, remembered how…
With the release of their sophomore album, ATLiens, the rap duo would become the progenitors of an otherworldly legacy—one that seems prophetic even on its 30th anniversary. Only now, reality itself seems to have collapsed upon the imaginative fervor of the present. It’s a vein of Afrofuturism that has gone haywire.
Every Sunday, milk crate revisits an iconic piece of music history—artist, album, or otherwise—as a part of our weekly crate digging series. Design by Sophie Parrish BY: GABRIELLE FINUCAN I find myself with an earworm carrying its way through my body on a consistent basis. At my part-time job, I hum to myself a snippet…
Buch’s vocal performance and intimate, often body-related lyrics added to this sense of watching someone’s creative process unfold. Because of her stripped-back song styles, consisting of a couple of synths, repeating guitar lines, and the occasional drum machine, her singing stood out. She has a soft, smooth, honey-like contralto voice, but it commanded the room.
Music, Fashion, Film, is many things. It’s her funniest album. It’s sneakily catchy and some of the more simplistic lyrics can come off quite wise. The shift to guitars and rock music is done in a fascinating way; this is certainly not your typical 2020’s pop-punk revivalism. Charli’s dabbled in rock on her sophomore album, the sometimes delightful, sometimes downright interminable Sucker, and it’s done much more gracefully and fittingly here. But there’s also the fact that it begs the listener not to like it. Charli has a habit in interviews lately where she basically says that the album is ironic, but it isn’t, but it is, but it’s not. Don’t get me wrong, the album is certainly well-made and enjoyable, but is impossible to divorce from her larger-than-life persona. So much of the album, as with Brat, feels buried in the marketing, and as a longtime fan, after two extremely emotional, vulnerable, image-focused records, it’s hard not to want songs about going fast in cars again. But Music, Fashion, Film is here, and it’s a true conversation starter. The most polarizing things can sometimes last forever.
Throughout his songs, Meek peppers his existential musings with strange string-theory stuff: love is the invisible dimensional structure of reality; we may reincarnate as light beams and photons bouncing around. Much like some of the most thematically interesting songs his other band, Big Thief, have put out, Meek can find a needle in a cosmic haystack—that is to say, he pulls off metaphors of wild association, braiding bluegrass and stardust in a way that makes folk music feel refreshingly of-the-times.
I was met at the door of Paradise Rock Club in a torrential downpour by a hype beast pleading in the face of security as earnestly as he could muster: “I swear to god. That is a real ID.” The hour of Feng was fast approaching.
On Detour, Kim Petras careens between being existential and earnest and being trashy and annoying, but what she never is is boring. It’s good to have her back.