Tag: tiny mix tapes

New Releases


Zola Jesus – Conatus
There has always been something almost subliminally idol-killing about the Zola Jesus project, and it really comes into focus here. Danilova’s childhood opera aspirations are subverted into something nearly opposite. Opera singing is narrative and flows smoothly from deep within. Danilova is more allusive and tortuous. Her voice keeps getting caught in her throat, where it’s stressed and twisted by transient emotional surges. Though the theatricality and the epic-pop trappings may evoke artists like Dead Can Dance, the vocals have the passion of blues singing. Danilova is equally iconoclastic when it comes to industrial influences like Throbbing Gristle, finding ways to make abrasion as musical as possible without sacrificing tension. Her touchstones have been digested into a personal style that is much more substance than reference. Read the full review on Pitchfork


Mastodon – The Hunter
The Hunter sees Mastodon taking a much more riff-heavy approach — shorter songs, more bombast — without compromising their epic feel. A purist raised on the literary universes encompassed on the band’s last three albums (Leviathan, 2004; Blood Mountain, 2006; and Crack the Skye, 2009) could pine for the 13-minute cosmic journey, but The Hunter is just as expansive as any of Mastodon’s earlier efforts, despite the lack of Hawkwind-style noodling. Having a pop radio producer at the helm seems not to have diminished the band’s determination to push boundaries, but rather to have made that desire more concise, more focused, and somehow more powerful. The shine given to The Hunter is definitely worthy of Warner Bros. (the parent of Reprise), and a measure of rock-radio friendliness hasn’t been a barrier to metal bands in the past. Read the full review on Tiny Mix Tapes


St. Vincent – Strange Mercy
Describing Annie Clark’s work as St. Vincent comes down to a toss-up between cinematic and clever. Both in the studio and in her videos, Clark is captivating, expansive, and yet undemanding. She slyly earns your attention with bombastic hooks, witty turns of phrase, or by mentoring a kid who just got a merit badge for “mind sandwich” (all done together in the video for “Jesus Saves, I Spend”), and then she reels you in further. She convinces you to take another step closer to the difficult subjects she intends to work out. Many were drawn in by the title track of her debut, Marry Me, for its cute power, the smoky vocals, the pretty girl singing directly to you with stark emotion. But what sticks in the end are her clever twists (“Let’s do what Mary and Joseph did… without the kid”) and the huge scope of such a simple song. Read the full review on Consequence of Sound

New Releases


Lady Gaga – Born This Way
It is perhaps no small wonder that democracy today appears as a specifically feminine, and perhaps feminist, art. < > presents herself here as a giant womb of freedom, large enough to hold Whitman himself, if not Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band. A Lady Liberty for the < >, she’s not afraid to get her robes dirty, throw back a few shots, and spread democracy in a venereal fashion. As she makes clear in one of her more spiritually-minded songs, “In the most Biblical sense, I am beyond repentance/ Fame hooker, prostitute wench, vomits her mind/ But in the cultural sense/ I just speak in future tense/ Judas kiss me if offensed/ Or wear ear condom next time.” But, in a way, this album seems beyond all politics — governmental, identitarian, or otherwise. Read The Full Review on Tiny Mix Tapes


Thurston Moore – Demolished Thoughts
For starters, Beck produced Demolished Thoughts. And regardless of him being a bat-shit Scientologist in real life, as a musician in the studio, Beck’s palette is bat-shit catholic. Might we get some Thurston “Bonus Noise,” a la Stereopathetic Soulmanure? (Moore did pen a liner essay for Odelay‘s deluxe, so there was at least a chance of a Branca-bustin’ cover of “Electric Music and the Summer People.”) Second, this is still a Thurston Moore record. And most of his part-time loves — The Bark Haze, Northampton Wools, etc. — have essentially been dirt-kink affairs. But just as skronk would have it, turns out that Demolished Thoughts is more akin to the dub narcotic folk of Beck’s One Foot in the Grave than anything Wylde Ratttz ever did. Read the Full Review on Dusted


Amon Tobin – ISAM
Upon hitting play, Amon takes the listener on a journey through twelve tracks that switch from chilled and laidback to gritty and at some points hectic, but always vivid and never lacking a theme. Journeyman opens the album with a dark and twisted lullaby that becomes progressively more psychedelic along the way, after which more sonic warfare is transposed on tunes such as the brilliant Autechre-y Goto 10 and the stunning listening experience that is Wooden Toy, a tune that sounds deceivingly stripped but actually bursts with layers of melancholy and depth. Unlimited creativity is the keyword here. Genres, or any conventional programming really, are put aside. Read the full review on Beats & Beyond

New Releases


Explosions In The Sky – Take Care, Take Care
Take Care, Take Care, Take Care, the band’s fifth ‘proper’ album (and first since 2007’s All Of A Sudden…) makes a mockery of claims that the band are mere peddlers of music that has been done better before, either by others or themselves. Suggestions that the band basically deal in the same sonic material served up by, say, Mogwai or Godspeed You! Black Emperor are both lazy and misleading. Sure, there are elements that connect these (and many more) groups, relationships that can be usefully mapped out, but they all have their own distinctive voices. “Voice” is the right word to use here because it is largely the absence of voice (i.e., of “songs” or “lyrics”) that prompts the comparisons in the first place. But to say that one instrumental rock-informed group drawn to lengthy mood pieces is the equivalent of another is like saying that one jazz group is like another, or that composers of classical music are somehow all the same. Read the full review on Tiny Mix Tapes


Emmylou Harris – Hard Bargain
Because Hard Bargain contains enough uptempo material for contrast, the album’s ballads don’t blur together as they have on some of Harris’s recent records, which makes it easier to appreciate them on their own merits. “Lonely Girl” is a stunning mood piece, while “Dear Kate” pays homage to the late Kate McGarrigle, Harris’s longtime friend and collaborator. Though she’s always been known first and foremost as a song interpreter, Harris’s songwriting here is especially sharp. The gently rollicking “Home Sweet Home” boasts an unconventional melody that heightens the song’s overall sense of displacement, while the ballad “My Name is Emmett Till” finds Harris singing from the point of view of the young African American boy killed for violating the unspoken laws of the Jim Crow-era South. It’s the empathy in Harris’s writing and her intuitive, sensitive phrasing that keep the song from becoming maudlin or cloying. Read the full review on Slant


Prefuse 73 – The Only She Sounds
The Only She Chapters sounds inebriated. Each snare hit has a tail of diminishing echoes, and each ping of a sample is followed by a ripple of overtones. The diversity of rhythms is on par, but each one is unfurled at a snail’s pace. Melodies peak around the usual backdrop pastiche, but they are swaying amidst the drowsily nodding tempos. “The Only Valentine’s Day Failure” sounds like a King Tubby 45 at 33 RPMs. The eddying vocal samples of “The Only Serenidad” must have been created with the audio equivalent of a slowly rotating Paint ’n’ Swirl. During “The Only Trial of 9000 Suns”, the late Trish Keenan (R.I.P.) sounds less like the aloof retro-pop princess she was than that confusing final conversation you had leaving the bar with the pretty girl in the tangerine dress. Read the full review on Dusted

Prefuse 73