Album Review

  • 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.

  • By Storm Emerge From The Ashes of Injury Reserve Reborn on My Ghosts Go Ghost

    At this point in their career, By Storm, composed of rapper RiTchie with a T and producer Parker Corey — both formerly of the group Injury Reserve — are a duo defined almost as much by the mythology surrounding their music as the music itself. Since the 2021 release of Injury Reserve’s earth shattering By The Time I Get to Phoenix and the group’s subsequent dissolution/reformation into By Storm, it’s become common practice to wax poetic about their music’s innate connection to grief, about how the sporadic, confrontational sound of that final record so effectively embodied the devastation of post-mortem anguish like little hip-hop before it ever could — and that’s not denying that By The Time I Get to Phoenix was anything but an album about grief. 

  • IT’S IN THE NAME! How A$AP Rocky’s Don’t Be Dumb Reflects the Mature Leisure Route to Life. 

    The album is inverting in on itself, track to track. It is a warning for those who take themselves too seriously to loosen up, and a reminder to pay close attention. A lot has changed between album releases for Lord Pretty Flacko Jodye. He became the father of three kids. Became a partner to long-time collaborator, Rihanna. Was the face of many campaigns from Ray-Ban to Dior. Safe to say he has secured himself even more so from where we left off in his Discography. Don’t Be Dumb has its lesson in the name; it’s up to its listeners to take it into account.

  • Searching for an Afterglow? A Review

    EUSEXUA is the moment. Afterglow is the chaos that follows. The anarchic comedown of promise and mourning. Your head is still in the clouds, but your feet have landed on the ground. This album grows on you like the smudge of eyeliner after a long night, proof of evolution out of experience. Then it stays with you like the rhinestone you find behind your ear on a Tuesday. Afterglow, the sister album to EUSEXUA, continues the conceptual design of the FKA twigs universe. twigs is notorious for reinventing herself with each album, pushing the boundaries of her artistic experimentation in both sound and movement. Afterglow is the first release without a “new” twigs, but a continuation of the twigs she has spent the last two years building—it is arguably one of the strongest musical campaigns of our time. This record takes time to hook you, but put yourself on the city streets at 4 a.m. and you’ll be overcome with a glow of sorts.

  • I’m So Over It: A Review of Summer Walker’s “Finally Over It (The Afterparty)”

    Design by Christian Jones BY Eleniz Cary Never would I expect to see a recreation of Anna Nicole Smith and J. Howard Marshall’s 1994 wedding as cover art for an album, but alas, here we are. On November 14th, Summer Walker released her third album Finally Over It—this is the last installment in her Over…