Beyonce – Renaissance [Parkwood/Columbia 2022] She’s never been so unrelentingly sultry on a song-by-song basis like this, weaponizing an appeal that she was already a veteran of utilizing by the time she became a mother. After achieving creative freedom at the turn of the last decade every record since has been artier and more visceral. …
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Three years in and maybe it’s time to put out something like a rubric or framework so that the varying degrees of good and bad that I end each of these blurbs with has some reference. Let me also say that it’s not lost on me that these collections of song that I grade are …
Soul Coughing – Ruby Vroom [Slash/Warner Bros Records 1995] A cult act if there ever was one, this four-piece led by surrealist spoken word poet M. Doughty arrived out of NYC’s experimental jazz scene based in The Knitting Factory. The name of the game, no matter how much Doughty’s a guitarist and a LOUD SINGER, …
Le Tigre – Le Tigre [Mr. Lady 1999] Post Bikini Kill now, Kathleen Hannah & Co. make a new wave album where momentum proves dynamic, politics proves left, and scenarios both sincere and rhetorical prove immersibly enrapturing. Topics include saying fuck Giuliani, feminist shout outs that would be considered radical in the 90’s but typical …
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Big Thief – Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You [4AD 2022] These four friends from all over – Texas, Indiana, Israel – and whom all attended Berklee College of Music in Bah-sten but didn’t meet or coagulate until moving to Brooklyn, typically make sparse folky tunes whose forthrightness and even keeled temperament always …
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The Front Bottoms – Talon of the Hawk [Bar/None 2013] Second time out and they’re more refined. Funnier too, and it’s not just the accordion coming in when he mentions French on the he’s-a-condescending-prick opener. It’s to that point Brian Sella’s little repetitions he does while singing have become not just semi-annoying space fillers, but …
Liz Phair – Exile in Guyville [Matador 1995] A middle-class suburban Chicago gal composes sharp and slyly critical guitar tunes aimed at the toxic and annoying men of the indie scene. What the sum total becomes is also a depiction of the kind of lives of young women who fuck and fuck up, with real …
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Columbia Records 2021 When Georgia’s own Montero Lamar Hill accidentally made America’s most successful song of all time in 2019 he did many things at once; in the immediate term he became a lightning rod because of his perceived lack of “country authenticity” (see: racism) and aided the effort to bring Nine Inch Nails back …
Yasmin Williams – Urban Driftwood [SPINSTER 2021] In terms of technique her guitar playing is genius and innovative; plucks, strums, and taps with the fretboard on her lap like it’s a keyboard since that made more sense to her. To label it just mood music is to do injustice to the long tradition of Southern …
Beach Bunny – Honeymoon [Mom + Pop 2020]Chicago power pop as a jelly sandwich – two solid parts around a sweet and innutritious middle. 2.6/5 https://open.spotify.com/album/6QZyKchQivUBTSMcoBmlPa?si=ODQ-HRqxSXCK3UzakEWrUw Dltzk – Frailty [DeadAir 2021]P4k’s take was that this is an important work of “digi-core”, the latest in a long line of electronica combining dance-hooks with contemplativeness I first …
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