A Record At a Time

Mannequin Pussy is a punk band born in 2013 with a Sonic Youth kind of feel. They have so far released two albums and they can be listened in full in your work break, since the longest clocks at 18 minutes, and the shortest “Romantic”, is a mere minute quicker than its predecessor.

“Romantic”, then appears and disappears in a glimpse leaving very little to be said. The titular track is also the longest, lasting about 2:40 minutes, and everything else barely reaches two minutes in length.

The first track, “Kiss” is about everything you should expect from this, loud, aggressive, although not really abrasive, and, of course, fast. That isn’t to say that there isn’t some diversity here, “Emotional High” is an example of a slower paced track, that nonetheless only goes for a 1:27, time to go “Pledge”, a 1:20 minute shoegazy track. That was nice, next! “Denial”, a pop-rock track that almost reaches 2 minutes before the band decides to go back to fully fledged hardcore punk music.

Here we are again talking about Mr. Daniel Lopatin and his project Oneohtrix Point Never. Last time I checked out his debut album, but today we’ll tackle a fresh new release called Age Of, released earlier this month.

Age Of is more a continuation of his latest albums than anything resembling his debut, that means you should expect a very experimental and very glitchy experience out of this one.

Previous albums like “Garden of Delete” or “R Plus 7” have all had this eerie feeling to it. The music is catchy and really good, but there’s something off about it. This feeling is still present on “Age Of” and seems to be more prevalent than before.

This one also has some noise elements to it, which may or may not be related with the fact that Prurient participated on some of the tracks. The influence can be seen in tracks like “Warning” and the follow up “We’ll Take It”. But OPN has a beauty to it’s tracks that Prurient harsh approach rarely, although purposefully, reaches.

This beauty is shown in full force during the second track “Babylon” which may just be the most beautiful track in OPN’s catalogue, although I may say that it does remind me of what Bon Iver was doing on his “22, a Million” album. The abrupt shift right on the last seconds makes it an incredibly dark ending as well.

Props to “The Station” and “Black Snow” as well, for being some of the best tracks in here.

My knowledge of chinese music isn’t very vast. Some may say inexistent, although I do know that one chinese Grimes track. That said, I really wasn’t expecting that the first chinese album I’d listen would be this good, but I was very wrong.

Omnipotent Youth Society, or Wanneng Qingnian Ludian, it’s chinese name, is a alternative rock band formed in late 90’s, but their first, and so far only, album was released only in 2010, the self-titled Omnipotent Youth Society. Still, it does feel like something you could hear back during the late 90s fresh of Grunge’s influence.

But I think this album really proves that music transcends language, not even understanding anything that is being said, I can feel the emotion emanating from the instrumentals and the vocals, specially on the third, “A Heart Wrenching Joke and a Long Daydream”,  and on the last track of this album, “Kill The One from Shijiazhuang”. Oh, same thing for “Ten Thousand Hippies”, all tracks that just emanate a sense of serenity and calm.

But not all of the album is a serene journey, not even counting the sudden shift to harsh noise midways towards “Throughout the Drinkeries of This Plane”, the longest track on the album, Omnipotent Youth Society starts with two minutes of pure instrumental rock on the track “Palace of the Dog Pise”, just to get us in the mood for the rest of the album, that really starts off big with the follow up “The Less Than Omnipotent Comedy”.

Churches or CHVRCHES, is one of the best electropop bands out there, and their second album, “Every Open Eye” is one of my recent favourite albums, every track is just an explosion of energy and it’s perfect to cheer you up or make you want to dance.

“Love is Dead” is their latest album and was released late last month in a midst of a bunch of releases by bands/artists that I really like, but this was probably the one I was most excited for from the bunch.

And right from the very first track, “Graffiti”, and all the way to the last one, “Wonderland”, this album just hits every tick that made the previous album great, but while I listened to it, and specially on further listens, I really noticed that I didn’t really invoke the same feeling that the precious one did. I can’t really explain it, but it doesn’t FEEL as good.

Of course this is just comparing albums, “Love is Dead” by itself is not a bad album, not at all, all songs are good, it’s just that, in Chvrches discography, it may be their weakest album. Few songs can be compared to the ones in “Every Open Eye”... Maybe it’s unfair to just compare it though. I’m sure that in further listens my appreciation for this album will only grow.

It’s been 7 years since Snow Patrol released an album, the longest gap between albums the band ever had, since releasing their debut all the way back in 1998.

So “Wildness”, it’s new album not only is the first Snow Patrol album in awhile, it’s also it’s 20th anniversary celebration of sorts. With all that I expected them to deliver a very solid album for it’s fans but what happened was… Exactly that, actually!

“Wildness” feels very much like a Snow Patrol album, and if you like any album released after “Final Straw” (inclusivé), then you’ll like this one right here. Personally I feel like it’s a step above most of Snow Patrol albums, and definitely their best work since Eyes Open, back in 2006.

Lyrically it feels like an improvement to what they’ve been doing, I mean, yes, there’s still just love songs, but it feels like there’s a broader range of topics and a bigger sense of importance as well. It’s not just about romance, it’s about life and death. “Shouldn't need to be so fucking hard / This is life on earth / It's just life on earth / It doesn't need to be the end of you, or me” sings Lightbody on the first track’s chorus, “Life on Earth”.

The second track, “Don’t Give In” may be my favourite track on the whole thing, and one of Snow Patrol greatest tracks overall, it’s as emotional and powerful as Snow Patrol can make it, and that’s a lot, and the same can be said about the follow up track “Heal Me”. And then there’s also “A Dark Switch”, that song is so God Damn catchy!

The whole album is great though, I don’t dislike a single song, and although I’d say that the first half is better than the second, I think that’s just because it’s so great and not because the later is missing in quality.

I generally don’t listen to World music, just tends to pass me by. Maybe because of that Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu’s posthumous album “Djarimirri” came as a surprise to me.

Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu was a Indigenous Australian musician who passed away last year, due to liver and kidney diseases. He is the most commercially successful Aboriginal Australian artist so far and his first Posthumous album, released last month, just came to reinforce that, becoming the only second album of its kind to peak number 1 at the Australian charts.

The album is a presentation of traditional songs and chants from Yolngu but with an extra orchestra to help, and it’s amazing.

From the very start this feels like a different kind of journey, the very first track builds up for something big, and the entire album feels big, the chants, the orchestra and specially Gurrumul’s beautiful voice.

There’s some similarities between this album and orchestral pieces as a whole, movie soundtracks and the such as well, and it’s all ethereal and beautiful, but then Gurrumul starts singing and everything just takes up an entire level.

Today we’ll be talking about the best 60s album released in 2017.

Kacy & Clayton are a duo formed in 2011 with a sound and aesthetic very reminiscent of 60s folk. Normally I’d probably dismiss this kind of band, generally bands that go for a retro style tend to fail to capture the magic of the original source.

Not to say that “The Siren’s Song” is superior to a lot of the output they’re trying to recreate, but I do admit that just hearing a couple seconds of this one made me want to go listen to the entire thing.

The instrumentals are pretty chill, they have this 60s folk vibe, as previously mentioned, but what really sells this one is the vocals. Kacy has some of the best vocals I’ve heard. They remind me a lot of Joan Baez. They’re very soothing and beautiful, I especially recommend checking “A Certain Kind of Memory” to see what this woman can do, it’s easily the best track on the album.

Not to take anything from Clayton’s vocals, he sings a bit here and there, but he takes the lead role in the song “White Bukke Country” where he takes Kacy a run for her money, the only thing that really bugged me with this song is that if it wasn’t for the vocals, I thought I could confuse it with the first track, “The Light of Day”, at least the refrain sounds quite similar.

There’s probably a lot to be said about Les Rallizes Dénudés, it’s just sad that most of it can’t be found anywhere.

Les Rallizes Dénudés is a japanese band, despite it’s name, that formed back in 1968 and that the album we’ll be talking about today, “Heavier Than a Death in the Family”, is their most famous release, but it’s also a bootleg of live shows that is, nonetheless, available in Spotify. This is gonna be one of those days.

“Heavier Than a Death in the Family” is a bootleg (i.e. unofficial/unauthorized release) compilation from live shows from 1973 until 1977, released in 2002. All the tracks here are incredibly noisy and seem a bit ahead of their time.

This is basically a heavy shoegaze album more than a decade before My Bloody Valentine’s “Isn’t Anything” was even released. This reminds me a lot of one my favourite current bands, A Place To Bury Strangers.

Every track is loud and fuzzy, covering you in cloud of static that is even amped by it’s very lo-fi recording.

I really like what I’ve heard of Oneohtrix Point Never. Daniel Lopatin really knows how to deliver some pretty awesome sounding electronica and he made some of my all time favourite songs like “Animals”, “Sticky Drama” and “He She” which all have strong glitch vocal influences.

When I decided to check OPN debut album, Betrayed in the Octagon, released in 2007, I was not expecting it to deliver anything like his more recent material, like the ones I was familiar about and I was correct.

Betrayed in the Octagon is nonetheless an amazing accomplishment from beginning to end that does rival albums like “Garden of Delete” and “Replica” in the argument of which is OPN’s very best.

The first track, “Woe Is the Transgression I”, is a long drony experience, it feels just like a constant draw out note and I expected this sound to be a constant throughout the album, but with the exception of the sequel to this track, found later in the album, the rest of the album is pretty varied. And even “Woe Is the Transgression II”, while keeping that drone atmosphere, it’s more varied than its predecessor as well, and it’s filled with ghostly sounds that remind me of some of Nocturnal Emissions best.

“Behind the Bank” is a vaporwavesque chill track (a genre he helped pioneering), “Eyeballs” is a noisy electronic track that is probably the closest track to OPN’s current output. The titular track, “Betrayed in the Octagon”, “Parallel Minds” and the final track “Laser to Laser” all give me some sci-fi vibes and, specially the last song, feels like they could fit in right into a soundtrack like Stranger Things.

The Misfits is a band probably more known by their gimmick than their songs, but the band is a pretty solid hardcore punk act, and I think their longevity is proof of that. Formed in 1977, Static Age, the album we’ll be talking today, is technically their debut album, although only being released in 1996, a whopping eighteen years after being recorded!

A lot of these songs had been released before and it includes some of Misfits finest and most famous work, like “Last Caress” and “Teenagers From Mars”, which had been seen before in Collection I & II.

If you know Misfits, this album is exactly what you’ll expect from them, Hell, this album is probably what you know about Misfits, it’s all about an hardcore punk sound, very tongue-in-cheek lyrics and, most importantly, to just have a lot of fun!

It was my first time listening to this album in full, but I knew most of the songs already, I love the previous mentioned but songs like “Attitude”, “She”, “We Are 138” were also familiar songs that I didn’t resist singing along. Even the songs that I didn’t knew ended up being fantastic. I’d point out “Hybrid Moments” and “Hollywood Babylon” as some new favourite tracks for me.

Big songs are scary. I mean, sure, the new Brian Eno album may be 5 hours long, but I don’t really need to sit through all those fives hours in a row, and I don’t think it was made for that.

Songs with 20 plus minutes are intimidating by themselves, even if they were on vogue in the midst of the 60s and 70 prog rock boom, so when bands like Jethro Tull throw us more than an hour long songs, you think twice before putting that thing on.

Sleep’s Dopesmoker is the perfect example of this, a track that lasts for the entirety of the album, clocking at 63 minutes. It’s one of the most famous tracks in Doom and Metal in general, but last year a challenger appear to take it’s throne.

Bell Witch’s Mirror Reaper is a Doom Metal track of epic proportions, lasting 83 minutes and 15 seconds. It’s so massive in fact that the only way to enjoy the song without breaks is digitally since even the CD version had to be a double album.

A lot of long songs use transformations and passages to change and morph and a lot of the times end up feeling like different tracks mashed together, and while saying that Mirror Reaper doesn’t change, it certainly does, going from heavy to calm, instrumental to full on growling, with moments with pristine vocals as well, but it never feels like a different track and that helps the feeling that this is something of epic proportions.

This feeling is emphasized by it’s Doom elements, the song is slow paced, but it’s heavy, it feels like a journey since the very start, like you’re going on a different world, a ethereal, but visceral world. I even dare say it feels Lovecraftian, like you’re being part of something larger than life, something you could barely begin to comprehend and the cover art helps conveying this feeling so much, it’s on point with the album.

I’ve talked about Arctic Monkeys before on this blog, they’re, in my opinion, one of the best bands to emerge in the early 00s.

Their first album, “Whatever People Say Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not”, is amazing, and despite only have listened to it in recent years, it quickly climbed to be one of my all time favourites. Their high energy, catchy bassline and punk attitude was perfect.

The sound got a bit tammer as time went on and by the time we reached their last album, the 2013’s “AM”, the punk influences had left completely, but the catchy basslines and the high energy was still kept intact, and the entire album was also a pretty solid experience.

So, after half a decade, Arctic Monkeys came back with their sixth album, “Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino”, yesterday.

The name of the album reflects exactly on what the sound is… slow casino songs. Everything that I mentioned about AM’s sound is absent here, they turned around and dove straight into a different style. Now, you may like it or you may not and, personally, I didn’t.

In all honesty I think the weaker parts in AM’s discography is their slower tracks, it’s really not their strong point, so to do a full album focused heavily on that baffles me. I can’t really blame them for trying something different, but I think that even if you like this sound there’s better alternatives out there. I’d even dare say that Lana’s last album, that I talked about yesterday, is better at accomplishing what this album is trying to do.

I forced myself to listen to the album twice, but both times I really felt like going to listen to something else, maybe their previous stuff, and I listened the album with a couple more people and the reaction was more or less the same, with various degrees of tolerance.

In the end this album isn’t something that I think is going to be completely bashed or hated, it goes for a sound and I can’t say it’s horrible at it, there’s some good elements to it, but it’s not a AM album and if you want to listen to this album to get AM, you’re better off skipping it all together.

Lana Del Rey is probably one of the biggest artists around right now. She rose to fame with her 2012 album “Born to Die” and she’s been on a high ever since.

I first heard Del Rey in the movie The Great Gatsby, and I quite liked the song “Young and Beautiful”. I thought her voice was just gorgeous, and it really fit the sound and style of the movie and song. When it came to albums though, I’ve always felt like Lana just barely misses the mark.

All their albums have songs I enjoy, but I don’t think there was ever an album that I enjoyed from front to bottom. I always feel like she could deliver a stronger album. My favourite so far was Honeymoon, her 2015 release. Today I checked out her latest album, Lust for Life, which was released last year.

The first thing that strikes me with this album is that it really is a Lana Del Rey album, the sound is still very much the same, it has that nostalgic aesthetic to it, that she always tries to enforce with her visual style as well, it’s not necessarily a bad thing, if you enjoy her sound, this is more of the same. But on the other hand that’s what I felt, like I was listening to more of the same.

The album lasts more than one hour, which I think is far longer than it should be, there was a lot of times where I did felt like turning the whole thing off. Despite its lengthy size, I really didn’t had much memorable moments. I can say I didn’t like Summer Bummer, and I can say I enjoyed the lyrics of “God Bless America - And all the Beautiful People in It” and the follow up “When the World Was at War, We Kept Dancing”. But most of the album just blends together.

Kanye West is an… interesting person, let’s say that. Bizarre commentaries and weird tweets aside the two albums I did check from the man, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and Yeezus, also stroke me as that, interesting, but in a good way.

I was never really into Hip-Hop, but Kanye blurred the lines so much and created something so his that regardless of your opinion on the genre, they can be enjoyed on their own.

As far as I know this wasn’t always the case, the first three Kanye albums had a  more traditional hip-hop sound to them, with his new album just around the corner, I thought it was a good time to check out a bit more of his work.

At first I thought about checking his first album, 2004’s The College Dropout, but I was far more interested in the album that started his change of style, an album that is credited to have somewhat re-invented the genre and influenced big names in the genre like Lil Uzi Vert and Drake, his 2008 album 808s & Heartbreaks.

808s is named as so because of the heavy use of the drum machine Roland TR-808, that, together with a heavy use of auto-tune is what gives this album it’s characteristic sound.

This sounds like a electropop album, it’s fun, it’s happy, it’s catchy, it makes you want to dance and sing. Previous Kanye albums had me loving some tracks, but also skipping some as well, but in this Kanye delivers an album with just good tracks. Some I love, like RoboCop, others I just kinda like, as is the case with the opening track Say You Will, but I could listen to this album time and time again without skipping a single track… Well, maybe end it a bit early and remove the last track Pinocchio Story, the live Freestyle included right at the end of 808s. Not because it’s a bad track, far from it, but I feel like it doesn’t follow through with the rest of the album’s sound. But that’s also an extra more than anything and I’m not even sure it’s included in all versions of this album. Coldest Winter is a better closing track in my opinion.

One thing that also strikes me with this album is that, despite the common theme of 808s, the Heartbreaks, made at a time when Kanye’s mom had just passed away and his six-year relationship had just ended, this album sounds like it’s been made by someone who’s truly enjoying what he’s doing all the time.

Today marks two years since the release of A Moon Shaped Pool, the latest Radiohead album, which sounds like a good time as any to finally check it out.

Upon release this album had a lot of positive reviews, which is nothing new for Radiohead. The band formed in 1985, but released their first album only in 1993, where they found success quickly with their early hit “Creep”. From there on they moved away from their grunge based roots and album after album they kept releasing something different, starting to add up some electronic and experimental influences in their most successful album to date, OK Computer, that ended up being completely embraced by the time their 2000 album, Kid A, was released.

Most of the releases after Kid A seem to embrace completely that electronic and experimental side of Radiohead, but that differs with A Moon Shaped Pool. This album isn’t a return to the roots for the band, if anything, it’s actually more similar to their later output, but it’s far more acoustic and laid back on the electronica, and the result is also a far more somber release.

I really didn’t think that this album started the best way, the alphabetic order that this album was put in places “Burn The Witch” as the first track of the album, and it’s one of my least favourite on the entire album. If you want to know my favourite, it’s the beautiful fourth track, “Desert Island Disk”.

If I’m going to be honest, when I got recommended Thorns and I saw the year of release of this album and the cover, I was expecting something cheesy. The name as well, but to be fair, Thorns is up there with Mayhem in terms of creativity, so I let it slide.

Only after googling up the band did I discover, for my surprise, that Thorns was formed in 1989 and was part of the initial wave of Norwegian Black Metal being involved with names like Mayhem, Burzum and Emperor. They released a couple eps, but their actual album release was put into an halt when their guitarist, Snorre, was sent to prison together with Varg (from Burzum) on charge of being an accomplice to the murder of Euronymous, Mayhem’s guitarist.

So, when he finally was released, he and the rest of his band took upon themselves to finally release their debut LP, the self-titled Thorns,(which got his release in 2001) that we’ll be listening to today. Well.. I will, at least. You do you and all that.

I think the first difference I notice with Thorns self-titled and the original Black Metal scene is the cleaner vocals and production, but I also found a lot of Industrial influence, for my delight.

The beginning of “Shifting Channels” start with metallic bangs reminiscent of Einsturzende Neubauten, which is one of the best moments of the album, together with maybe the calm spaces of “Underneath the Universe 1”, which is a surprising but also somewhat pleasant surprise in the midst of all the normal aggression and speed of this thing.