Album Review

  • Music, Fashion, Film is Antagonistic and Brilliant

    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.

  • Summer of Self-Hatred: A Teens of Denial 10-Year Retrospective

    Design by Sophie Parrish By Declan Ireland It’s 2016 and you’re young—somehow younger than you already are. Everything has this heightened breathing quality, so much so that it takes on an awful animism. The world, your friends, your lover: all of it is powerful and wrong. Except you, my young friend, you have the distinct…

  • This Is A Dangerous Place: King Crimson’s Discipline

    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.

  • Obliterated by Sound: Tranquility of a Pink Horse Review

    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.

  • Life Still Feels like Exile in Guyville

    Exile in Guyville could be a sob story about shitty ex-boyfriends and childhood trauma and bad sex, but Phair doesn’t sing it like she wants your sympathy, or even like she’s particularly upset over the situation. It sounds like she’s resigned herself to it. It’s the tone of voice of a breakup that you’ve known is coming for months, the end of a relationship that you’ve already mourned the loss of by the time the conversation happens, the numbness that comes with deciding not to expect too much. Her vocals are devoid of any flourish or technical stylings, but are instead a monotone that sounds like she’s complaining to you over the phone.

  • Still All Fucked Up: 20 Years of Eiafuawn’s Birds in the Ground

    Unlike the steady and booming resurgence of Duster within the past years, Eiafuawn has seen little resurrection outside of smaller spaces. On February 25, 2022, archival record label The Numero Group released deluxe pressings of Birds in the Ground, as well as full Spotify and Bandcamp uploads. But the area that Eiafuawn finds itself in doesn’t need to be large, and the album doesn’t need a cultural revival. It only needs to play in quiet bedrooms and turned-up headphones, existing in the personal and authentic world it cultivates for each listener. 20 years later, Eiafuawn stands as a meaningful record of early 2000s slacker artistry—gloomy and detached yet oh so emotional. Maybe in our own interior worlds, everything is still all fucked up, but in Parton’s world of Birds in the Ground, everything is right.