Author: jon_jones

King Crimson’s 1981 endeavor of a concept Discipline was an entire shift for their career. Five years after Red and eleven after The Court of the Crimson King, King Crimson take on a completely new sound in the ’80s, one that is much more melody-based than their earlier work, which relies heavily on creating an ambient and droning atmosphere along with volume dynamics between members. Their older work is more resemblant of bands such as Yes and Can. They also had a bigger line up in their earlier formations, with both woodwind and string instruments. In the 1980s, King Crimson was exclusively a quartet that lasted through Discipline, Beat (1982), and Three of a Perfect Pair (1984). They leaned into the likes of Talking Heads and even groups like Gang of Four. Across their discography, songs follow a regular verse and chorus structure, maintaining their Crimsonian weirdness through the usage of time signature changes and polymetric modulation. Discipline marked new territory for King Crimson, and by the end of the album they already had perfected it.

In the Body High Tour, FKA twigs proved just how far she can take herself, from operatic vocals to afrobeat-dancehall, to ballroom, to pole dancing, to owning the stage simply by walking around with her hood up and a mic in her hand. Throughout the concert, I was reminded of the feeling that FKA twigs gave name to with her album “Eusexua”—a mixture of euphoria and sexuality, the body at its peak, egoless and immaterial. I can confidently say that Eusexua was present at the Body High Tour.

I first heard Sezen Aksu in the back of my mom’s minivan. Her song, “Değer Mi,” would play each time someone turned on the CD player, a glittery, synth-heavy pop song with a repeated hook: “Değer mi hiç, Değer mi hiç, Değer mi hiç,” which asks “is it worth it, is it worth it, is it worth it?” As a child, I sang along as best I phonetically could, without knowing how to speak Turkish. I sounded something like “dare me,” an Americanized take on Aksu’s lyricism. It wasn’t until I revisited the album in my junior year of high school that I began to uncover the true meaning of Aksu’s lyrics and see her music as more than just an old song still stuck in my head a decade later.

“Mira Niñita” by Los Jaivas The kind of song that just seems to be about everything. Deeply spiritual and overwhelmingly beautiful, like watching the stars in the night sky illuminate their way through the din in real time. As much a song about a father connecting with his daughter as it is about something far…

On February 6th of this year, Nashville based artist Ovven released his debut album, Gnawing At The Cord. The record quickly became one of the most memorable records of the year, blending country twang and rugged Midwest indie rock seamlessly. Recorded at Drop of Sun Studios in Asheville, North Carolina, and produced by Alex Farrar (who has also worked with modern indie icons MJ Lenderman, Wednesday, and Indigo De Souza), the record is a super fresh take on what he describes as “loud guitar music.” 

Last week, I got the chance to sit down with Ovven and pick his brain about the production of the album, Wilco, the great city of Nashville, and what comes next.

“Ingenue” by Atoms For Peace The beginning of this song reminds me of the first scene in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Stalactites dripping incessantly in the untouched hollows of the earth. Like saliva off the slack-jawed fangs of some granitic beast. Deep in those cratonic bowels where the water fell and sang. A death knell…

One month after my sixteenth birthday, I got to see Kid Cudi’s “To The Moon” tour at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn. I was young, and afraid of my own shadow but as I walked into the arena, already hazy with weed smoke, and saw twenty thousand other people who felt seen by Cudi’s lyrics, it melted away.

Tranquility is not the first word I would use to describe Andrew Snakez’s latest album; it’s the last. To get to the state described in its title, Tranquility of a Pink Horse, Snakez must first take us on a journey through fields of distortion and meadows of gentler longing, along the way lassoing an impressively diverse array of sonic influences into his coherent universe — simultaneously as familiar and unusual as its kitschy cover image of a pink horse mid-gallop.