Category: Album
-
Oui Plastique’s Forever Will Be Over Before You Know It Is Imagine Dragons Meets Depeche Mode, and Yes, It Works
Oui Plastique have made a second album I’m going to defend, mostly to people who flinch when electronic music gets this theatrical. Martin Nyrup and James Thomas, the Danish/UK duo behind the project, release “Forever Will Be Over Before You Know It” on 27 November through Town and Towers Records, and it’s the kind of…
-
The Allure of Risk and Real Freedom: “She’s Wild” by Little Quirks
Love is rarely a tended garden. Often it’s like a wild overgrown path where you can easily scratch yourself on the thorns of your own illusions. The thing in love I think, is letting go at the right time while still being true to who you are. For many growing up in your to-mid twenties…
-
“In the Kitchen Again”: Half a Century of Folk, Friendship, and Personal Stories by Anne Lederman
Musical tradition can sometimes resemble home cooking: on an old village table, the smells of different eras, stories, and countries mingle. Anne Lederman’s sixth solo album, “In the Kitchen Again”, gives the rare feeling of having touched living folklore. Lederman has played the violin for more than fifty years. She began with folk and singer-songwriter…
-
MALNEEZY Builds an Electronic World Where Readiness Sets the Pace
MALNEEZY made Night Time Fever while college, relationships and questions of personal worth were becoming difficult to hold together. Night Time Fever College supplies a calendar of deadlines and assessments; emotional life acquires a harsher logic when a person borrows that calendar to judge their own development. I hear the album’s central problem as one…
-
On “Under Water”, Penny Flows Chooses to Live – and Sing – Again
I approach debut releases with particular tenderness. A first encounter with an artist is always exciting: it is not yet known whether it will be a fleeting interest for a couple of listens or music that will stay with you for a long time. It was with exactly this feeling that I pressed play on…
-
Allison Lupton’s “Step Up Molly”: Songs That Will Become Folk Songs
A few days ago, Allison Lupton’s single “The Wonder” seemed to me a small, self-contained event: a warm story about how good it feels when people sing together. Today, it has gained context – the new album Step Up Molly, in which it appears as one of eleven stories. Having listened to the album in…
-
Tropical Light Over Denver: tom feral’s “Mango”
I thought that themes of love, heartbreak, uncertainty, and the search for happiness in music could only be conveyed through classical instruments. But “Mango“, an album by Denver-based producer tom feral, convinced me otherwise. It came out on October 11, one day after “Rotten“. Two releases one day apart is, I’d guess, risky: you can…
-
Rotten Is Why Your Neighbours Will Learn tom feral’s Name
tom feral released Rotten a day before Mango, which suggests an eccentric approach to ripening. The Denver producer has divided his latest material across consecutive releases, with the heavier club music occupying these nine tracks. I’m drawn to his willingness to put slightly ridiculous ideas to work inside a track built for dancing. A friend’s…
-
Jack Quigley’s Garden: The Debut Album “Upstream Vol. 1”
Jack Quigley makes me want to compare him to a horticulturalist who patiently and persistently works on cultivating new varieties, say, of apples, distinguished from those that already exist by their size, colour, flavour or, for example, exceptional frost resistance. This perhaps somewhat extravagant comparison came to me in connection with the story behind the…
-
The River Sings, the Stone Dances: Ratyński’s New EP “Last Exit from Utopia”
In my free minutes, I like to look at photos of mountain valleys and waterfalls or paintings where fog lies in ravines like a forgotten scarf. And I always turn on music. Not just any music, but only that which knows how to be silent between the notes. Then something happens. A stone in the…
