Like David Blaine, elusive Detroit collective the Armed have spent their career building false personas just to dramatically set fire to them. With third ...Show more
Like David Blaine, elusive Detroit collective the Armed have spent their career building false personas just to dramatically set fire to them. With third album ULTRAPOP, they elevate their blend of blistering hardcore and melodic pop hooks by roping in chipper synths (“ALL FUTURES”), relentless drum change-ups (“AN ITERATION”), and strangely soothing vocal harmonies (“AVERAGE DEATH”). Now boasting an expanded lineup of 19 members, the Armed have made the rare rock breakthrough that feels all the more inviting—and not to mention, fun—for how mysterious it remains. –Nina Corcoran
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Like David Blaine, elusive Detroit collective the Armed have spent their career building false personas just to dramatically set fire to them. With third ...Show more
Like David Blaine, elusive Detroit collective the Armed have spent their career building false personas just to dramatically set fire to them. With third album ULTRAPOP, they elevate their blend of blistering hardcore and melodic pop hooks by roping in chipper synths (“ALL FUTURES”), relentless drum change-ups (“AN ITERATION”), and strangely soothing vocal harmonies (“AVERAGE DEATH”). Now boasting an expanded lineup of 19 members, the Armed have made the rare rock breakthrough that feels all the more inviting—and not to mention, fun—for how mysterious it remains. –Nina Corcoran
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After two albums and a best-selling memoir that grappled with her mother’s death, grief had been a top note in Michelle Zauner’s work for too long. On Jub...Show more
After two albums and a best-selling memoir that grappled with her mother’s death, grief had been a top note in Michelle Zauner’s work for too long. On Jubilee, her splashy third album as Japanese Breakfast, Zauner sucks up life through a crazy straw. She boosts her sound for a growing audience without smoothing over her idiosyncrasies, taking inspiration from the daily battle to tame one’s anxieties, from capitalist buffoonery, and even from the concept of inspiration itself. “How’s it feel to stand at the height of your powers?” she sings. The answer is hers to divulge. –Olivia Horn
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After two albums and a best-selling memoir that grappled with her mother’s death, grief had been a top note in Michelle Zauner’s work for too long. On Jub...Show more
After two albums and a best-selling memoir that grappled with her mother’s death, grief had been a top note in Michelle Zauner’s work for too long. On Jubilee, her splashy third album as Japanese Breakfast, Zauner sucks up life through a crazy straw. She boosts her sound for a growing audience without smoothing over her idiosyncrasies, taking inspiration from the daily battle to tame one’s anxieties, from capitalist buffoonery, and even from the concept of inspiration itself. “How’s it feel to stand at the height of your powers?” she sings. The answer is hers to divulge. –Olivia Horn
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Not many people willingly revisit the tumult of their teen years, but on her third album Home Video, Lucy Dacus embraces a perspective gained only by the ...Show more
Not many people willingly revisit the tumult of their teen years, but on her third album Home Video, Lucy Dacus embraces a perspective gained only by the passage of time. Atop synths like glowing orbs and hushed strumming, she recalls the loneliness of being a late bloomer, the confusion of burgeoning queerness, and the hormonal paradise that was Christian sleepaway camp. In these quietly unspooling songs, Dacus lifts scenes straight from her journals and renders them anew with poetic sensuality: flushed red cheeks, sun-kissed skin, the crescent moon indents of nails pressed into flesh, and a looming future. –Quinn Moreland
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Not many people willingly revisit the tumult of their teen years, but on her third album Home Video, Lucy Dacus embraces a perspective gained only by the ...Show more
Not many people willingly revisit the tumult of their teen years, but on her third album Home Video, Lucy Dacus embraces a perspective gained only by the passage of time. Atop synths like glowing orbs and hushed strumming, she recalls the loneliness of being a late bloomer, the confusion of burgeoning queerness, and the hormonal paradise that was Christian sleepaway camp. In these quietly unspooling songs, Dacus lifts scenes straight from her journals and renders them anew with poetic sensuality: flushed red cheeks, sun-kissed skin, the crescent moon indents of nails pressed into flesh, and a looming future. –Quinn Moreland
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During the title track of Carnage, a strange and quiet album that Nick Cave recorded with his longtime accompanist Warren Ellis, the 64-year-old musician ...Show more
During the title track of Carnage, a strange and quiet album that Nick Cave recorded with his longtime accompanist Warren Ellis, the 64-year-old musician sits on his balcony and tries to write a song. He’s got a pencil in his hand and a Flannery O’Connor book open for inspiration as his mind drifts to a childhood memory of his uncle. Suddenly, Cave sees himself as a kid, and we see him, too. The arrangement, which began as a dreary trudge of electric guitar and synth, slowly fills with color, like a rainbow forming in a gray sky. As with the best of Cave’s recent work, it is an intimate moment presented as documentary and psychological horror, blending the boundaries between past and future, dreams and nightmares. –Sam Sodomsky
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During the title track of Carnage, a strange and quiet album that Nick Cave recorded with his longtime accompanist Warren Ellis, the 64-year-old musician ...Show more
During the title track of Carnage, a strange and quiet album that Nick Cave recorded with his longtime accompanist Warren Ellis, the 64-year-old musician sits on his balcony and tries to write a song. He’s got a pencil in his hand and a Flannery O’Connor book open for inspiration as his mind drifts to a childhood memory of his uncle. Suddenly, Cave sees himself as a kid, and we see him, too. The arrangement, which began as a dreary trudge of electric guitar and synth, slowly fills with color, like a rainbow forming in a gray sky. As with the best of Cave’s recent work, it is an intimate moment presented as documentary and psychological horror, blending the boundaries between past and future, dreams and nightmares. –Sam Sodomsky
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A Canadian singer-songwriter with an aura of purposeful solitude, a gift for drawing insight and revelation from minute observations of relationships and ...Show more
A Canadian singer-songwriter with an aura of purposeful solitude, a gift for drawing insight and revelation from minute observations of relationships and environments, and an ear for melodies that dip, wind, and double back like trains of thought. After a few great albums, most of them sparse and muted, she assembles a band that can channel the exuberance of her era’s pop rhythms and twist them toward her own idiosyncratic ends. Far from dampening the music’s acuity and expressiveness, making them softly palatable, these new grooves accompany some of the sharpest songs of her career. Weather Station bandleader Tamara Lindeman might be tired of hearing Joni Mitchell comparisons at this point, but the resemblance is uncanny: Ignorance is something like her Court and Spark.
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A Canadian singer-songwriter with an aura of purposeful solitude, a gift for drawing insight and revelation from minute observations of relationships and ...Show more
A Canadian singer-songwriter with an aura of purposeful solitude, a gift for drawing insight and revelation from minute observations of relationships and environments, and an ear for melodies that dip, wind, and double back like trains of thought. After a few great albums, most of them sparse and muted, she assembles a band that can channel the exuberance of her era’s pop rhythms and twist them toward her own idiosyncratic ends. Far from dampening the music’s acuity and expressiveness, making them softly palatable, these new grooves accompany some of the sharpest songs of her career. Weather Station bandleader Tamara Lindeman might be tired of hearing Joni Mitchell comparisons at this point, but the resemblance is uncanny: Ignorance is something like her Court and Spark.
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One way to hear New Long Leg is as a cringe-tinged dramedy—like Fleabag or Girls—with Florence Shaw as the performer who knows exactly how to deliver her ...Show more
One way to hear New Long Leg is as a cringe-tinged dramedy—like Fleabag or Girls—with Florence Shaw as the performer who knows exactly how to deliver her own script. This album is not the type to be nominated for a Grammy, but it really ought to get Emmys for writing and acting. The lyrics infest your brain with quotables that reverberate for days, but more than the words it’s Shaw’s intonation that’s so funny and so heartbreaking: the grudging cadences, the way she can inject an unreadable alloy of earnestness and irony into an inanity like “I can rebuild.” The self-portrait painted here is of a burned-out shell drifting numbly through a life that senselessly accumulates irritations, humiliations, discomforts, chores, and interpersonal skirmishes, offset by the tiny comforts of Twix bars and artisanal treats. There’s a personal dimension to the inner emptiness (a sapping break-up), but because New Long Leg’s release coincided with the depressive pall that swept over the world thanks to lockdown, Shaw’s interiority synced up perfectly with exterior conditions. It’s no coincidence that the most exciting rock record in years is about the inability to feel excitement. Within Shaw is a voice of a generation distilling how it feels to be alive right now: “Do everything and feel nothing.” –Simon Reynolds
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One way to hear New Long Leg is as a cringe-tinged dramedy—like Fleabag or Girls—with Florence Shaw as the performer who knows exactly how to deliver her ...Show more
One way to hear New Long Leg is as a cringe-tinged dramedy—like Fleabag or Girls—with Florence Shaw as the performer who knows exactly how to deliver her own script. This album is not the type to be nominated for a Grammy, but it really ought to get Emmys for writing and acting. The lyrics infest your brain with quotables that reverberate for days, but more than the words it’s Shaw’s intonation that’s so funny and so heartbreaking: the grudging cadences, the way she can inject an unreadable alloy of earnestness and irony into an inanity like “I can rebuild.” The self-portrait painted here is of a burned-out shell drifting numbly through a life that senselessly accumulates irritations, humiliations, discomforts, chores, and interpersonal skirmishes, offset by the tiny comforts of Twix bars and artisanal treats. There’s a personal dimension to the inner emptiness (a sapping break-up), but because New Long Leg’s release coincided with the depressive pall that swept over the world thanks to lockdown, Shaw’s interiority synced up perfectly with exterior conditions. It’s no coincidence that the most exciting rock record in years is about the inability to feel excitement. Within Shaw is a voice of a generation distilling how it feels to be alive right now: “Do everything and feel nothing.” –Simon Reynolds
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Nearly 30 years into their career, Low have moved beyond simply writing great songs: They are now focused on the way those songs travel from the speakers ...Show more
Nearly 30 years into their career, Low have moved beyond simply writing great songs: They are now focused on the way those songs travel from the speakers to our ears: a strange, circuitous journey that makes HEY WHAT feel like genuinely new territory. It is easy to imagine any of these 10 warped, noisy pieces of music in stripped-down arrangements. In fact, most of the songs tease that kind of delivery: Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker’s voices arrive in unison like folk singers, stripped of effects and clear in the mix, every word audible and sung in simple, hummable melodies. But with producer BJ Burton, Sparhawk and Parker interrupt and distort themselves, filtering their stark, psalm-like compositions through the kind of processing that makes a guitar solo squeal into feedback, or the sound from your speakers clip into static. It is a beautiful, adventurous album from a band who is letting their music fall into disorder and who, in doing so, have never sounded more in control. –Sam Sodomsky
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Nearly 30 years into their career, Low have moved beyond simply writing great songs: They are now focused on the way those songs travel from the speakers ...Show more
Nearly 30 years into their career, Low have moved beyond simply writing great songs: They are now focused on the way those songs travel from the speakers to our ears: a strange, circuitous journey that makes HEY WHAT feel like genuinely new territory. It is easy to imagine any of these 10 warped, noisy pieces of music in stripped-down arrangements. In fact, most of the songs tease that kind of delivery: Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker’s voices arrive in unison like folk singers, stripped of effects and clear in the mix, every word audible and sung in simple, hummable melodies. But with producer BJ Burton, Sparhawk and Parker interrupt and distort themselves, filtering their stark, psalm-like compositions through the kind of processing that makes a guitar solo squeal into feedback, or the sound from your speakers clip into static. It is a beautiful, adventurous album from a band who is letting their music fall into disorder and who, in doing so, have never sounded more in control. –Sam Sodomsky
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After the world spent 18 months at home, the Baltimore band Turnstile unleashed Glow On unto a rapidly-growing audience that could not have possibly been ...Show more
After the world spent 18 months at home, the Baltimore band Turnstile unleashed Glow On unto a rapidly-growing audience that could not have possibly been better primed to receive its 34 minutes of nonstop feeling. Is this post-hardcore? Pop hardcore? Streetwear Fugazi? Do you “have to see it live to get it”? No matter how you square their multitudes, Turnstile know that hardcore is fundamentally interactive music—you don’t just listen; you participate; together—and Glow On facilitates it. This might mean screaming along to the tidal hooks of “Mystery” and “Holiday” to lock in with a kinetic crowd. It might mean having a moment of connected introspection with lyrics like “I just need to know I’m working for the big prize” or “Can’t be the only one” or “Thank you for letting me see myself” (just like those Turnstilemaniacs nodding along in the sublime Turnstile Love Connection film). Or maybe it means allowing Glow On’s hypercharged riffs and blast beats—its synth arpeggios, sing-rapping, Caribbean rhythms, and Dev Hynes harmonies—to fluidly eclipse your misfit soul, clarifying that it belongs here. –Jenn Pelly
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After the world spent 18 months at home, the Baltimore band Turnstile unleashed Glow On unto a rapidly-growing audience that could not have possibly been ...Show more
After the world spent 18 months at home, the Baltimore band Turnstile unleashed Glow On unto a rapidly-growing audience that could not have possibly been better primed to receive its 34 minutes of nonstop feeling. Is this post-hardcore? Pop hardcore? Streetwear Fugazi? Do you “have to see it live to get it”? No matter how you square their multitudes, Turnstile know that hardcore is fundamentally interactive music—you don’t just listen; you participate; together—and Glow On facilitates it. This might mean screaming along to the tidal hooks of “Mystery” and “Holiday” to lock in with a kinetic crowd. It might mean having a moment of connected introspection with lyrics like “I just need to know I’m working for the big prize” or “Can’t be the only one” or “Thank you for letting me see myself” (just like those Turnstilemaniacs nodding along in the sublime Turnstile Love Connection film). Or maybe it means allowing Glow On’s hypercharged riffs and blast beats—its synth arpeggios, sing-rapping, Caribbean rhythms, and Dev Hynes harmonies—to fluidly eclipse your misfit soul, clarifying that it belongs here. –Jenn Pelly
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The War on Drugs’ synth-heavy fifth album is bright and sparkly—it fizzes and pops and then glows until fading into darkness—as bandleader Adam Granduciel...Show more
The War on Drugs’ synth-heavy fifth album is bright and sparkly—it fizzes and pops and then glows until fading into darkness—as bandleader Adam Granduciel yet again channels and transforms the once-maligned sound of big-ticket mainstream rock circa 1987. The songs he writes are about heavy things—love, death, loneliness—but, whatever the subject, they always circle back to memory, our deeply flawed process for storing and retrieving the past. Granduciel’s characters are haunted by where they’ve been and what they’ve seen, and he surrounds them with discarded fragments of music history that become special because of how he remembers them. –Mark Richardson
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The War on Drugs’ synth-heavy fifth album is bright and sparkly—it fizzes and pops and then glows until fading into darkness—as bandleader Adam Granduciel...Show more
The War on Drugs’ synth-heavy fifth album is bright and sparkly—it fizzes and pops and then glows until fading into darkness—as bandleader Adam Granduciel yet again channels and transforms the once-maligned sound of big-ticket mainstream rock circa 1987. The songs he writes are about heavy things—love, death, loneliness—but, whatever the subject, they always circle back to memory, our deeply flawed process for storing and retrieving the past. Granduciel’s characters are haunted by where they’ve been and what they’ve seen, and he surrounds them with discarded fragments of music history that become special because of how he remembers them. –Mark Richardson
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LVCCLD_Adults
LVCCLD_Adults
