Album Review: Six Organs Of Admittance – Luminous Night
Concept: Ben Chasny’s solo project arrives at its eleventh album, the fourth in its gradual progression from acoustic to electric arrangement. Sound: Six Organs Of Admittance has always been a sort of missing link in the more glorified story of rock, having worked alongside both Sonic Youth, the punks who changed the way mainstream music [...]
Album Review: Rodrigo Y Gabriela – 11:11
Concept: The popular duet group establishes a tribute to Hindu and Mesoamerican mythologies and the notion of synchronicity. Sound: Rodrigo and Gabriela are proof that ‘genre-bending’ doesn’t have to be some nearly unapproachable process of trial-and-error, having in their last album incorporated metal, classical, and Mexican folk into percussive acoustic guitar pieces. They disavow any [...]
Album Review: The Clientele – Bonfires On The Heath
Concept: British band promote the modern history of their musical and lyrical roots. Sound: The Clientele try to touch on a couple forms of the oldies; funk, 60′s rock, and both fast and slow psychedelic tunes inhabit the album. There’s nothing new about it (nobody needs to be reminded that Pink Floyd or The Beatles [...]
Album Review: Lightning Bolt – Earthly Delights
Concept: The dynamic duo is back after too long with their latest bundle of thrash. Sound: Nobody that listened to the last five minutes of Dead Cowboy will forget Lightning Bolt, a scrappy drummer in overdrive wearing a mask implanted with a telephone mic and a bassist modded with banjo strings and more distortion than Glenn [...]
Album Review: Nosaj Thing – Drift
Concept: The debut LP for the electronic artist seeks to stay out of the spotlight with ambience and abstraction. Sound: Although the organ carries most of the melody, there are a fair number of samples tucked away in every song which should intrigue a nonchalant listener. There need to be more heavy, ethereal tracks like [...]
Album Review: The Antlers – Hospice
Concept: It is not confirmed yet whether the story comes from experience…a man reminiscing on his life while sitting beside a child dying of bone cancer in the MSKCC. Sound: It really depends. You aren’t listening to antlers as much as streamers. Long, quiet, and often dull passages are tethered to immense emotional weight, flowing [...]
Album Review: Modest Mouse – No One's First And You're Next
Concept: An EP of polished tracks from the cutting floors of their last two albums. Sound: A lot of the songs aren’t necessarily the rare tracks a fan might have discovered before now, but they do recycle previous material. The EP fits together rather nicely in its own right. This isn’t just a grab bag [...]
Album Review: Sunn O))) – Monoliths And Dimensions
Concept: Two years in the making, the metal band’s latest effort cooperates with a gigantic cast of instruments and composer Eyvind Kang. The result is four works intended to create auditory illusions through experimentation with timbre. Sound: The first four and a half minutes of track one, I wasn’t feeling anything. It’s a fat old guitar [...]
Album Review: Future Of The Left – Travels With Myself And Another
Concept: The second album for the second Mclusky, which is the closest you’ll get to a “real” living punk band that everyone could know about. In a world where the genreish movement is either dead or in hiding, the idea of punk is all about the blame game, and frontman Andy Falkous always plays to win. [...]
Album Review: The Mars Volta – Octahedron
Concept: Somehow, freak-out specialists The Mars Volta manage to restrain themselves and crank out a jam-packed, multifaceted pop-rock album. Sound: Keyboardist Ikey Owens is the first thing long-time listeners will notice. He bridges every track, and offers much more atmosphere throughout the album, which is generally slower than the bands’ usual fare. Vocalist Cedric-Bixler Zavala’s [...]