Category: Album

As we predicted in April after the single “Union Song,” Tyler Ellis has returned with the full-length album “Hardwarestore”. If one were to find an exact image for Tyler, he is a “philosopher with a workbench.” A master of delicate truths, confidently holding both a pencil and the neck of an old Gibson. In his…

“We struggle with the riddles of thirty-year-olds like butterflies against glass,” once wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald, subtly noting the time when youthful decorations crumble, and new ones have not yet been built. Such a borderline state is a slightly awkward draft in a room where you suddenly understand: the life that you so diligently created…

In one of the shots of Andrei Tarkovsky’s film “Nostalgia,” the main character tries to carry a lit candle across the dried pool of Saint Catherine. The trembling, vulnerable flame that must be protected from the wind is a metaphor for longing for the homeland and a desperate attempt to preserve a living connection with…

“Art is the extraction of order from chaos,” a philosopher once remarked, and he could hardly have imagined how precisely these words would sound in the digital age. Musical algorithms today stamp out a flawlessly sterile “content stream,” so the appearance of the album “The Musical Bruises of a Recovering Dreamer” against this backdrop looks…

Gabriel García Márquez has a thought that still sounds sharp today: “Life is not only what one lived, but also what one remembers, and how one remembers it in order to tell it.” When the world around begins to resemble a fragile glass castle, ready to crumble from any sharp sound, art takes on the…

There’s a moment at live concerts: the musician pulls away from the microphone, looks out over the hall – and you realize he’s inside the story he’s singing. That’s exactly the feeling that stays with me while I listen to “Connectors” – the new album from Los Angeles singer-songwriter Mike Stocksdale. By the way, the…

In the 50s and 60s music was a tangible matter. The middle of the last century left us not only the crackle of vinyl and faded Polaroid photos, but also a special aura of time – an anxious anticipation of change, wrapped in the packaging of impeccable style. Garage rock was in the gap between…

In the first weeks of the lockdown, many suddenly discovered: silence is not at all the same as peace. Cities fell silent, streets emptied, and in this emptiness everyone was left alone with themselves – without the usual buffer of meetings, work, flights and exhausting running around that we call life. For some, this turned…

The Chicago band The Transference appeared on the indie scene in 2024 with the debut EP “100 Mirrors” – chamber, introspective, slightly cautious. That is what a first acquaintance is like: when you have not yet decided how much you can trust a stranger. Even then it was clear – the band know how to…

I have a weakness for sensual music with a cinematic sound – and especially for the kind where dark electronics coexist with something special. It is exactly this combination that I heard in the debut album “Composed Reality” by the Danish duo Fake Mannequin. Behind the name stand two people with completely different biographies; at…