The Tiny’s “Dog Eat Dog” Will Not Be Pigeonholed
There are a few words that I think critics, musical or otherwise, should use more carefully. Chief among them is “pretentious”, a word that I’ve all but struck from my vocabulary. It has become a cudgel, a way to sneeringly dismiss genuine ambition or creative vision. The joy of art, and music in particular, is […]
Slow Dakota’s “Burial of the Dead”: A Mystical Elegy in the Time of Climate Change
After the coronavirus pandemic brought society to a screeching halt, some people turned to nature for solace. A set of photographs went viral, showing the Venice canals with clear, healthy blue waters after quarantine forced humans to stay inside. Many people celebrated on social media, declaring nature’s triumph over human pollution: “Nature hit the reset […]
Bad Flamingo’s “Bad Apple”: Female-Forward Folk with a Gothic Atmosphere
“Bad Apple”, the eerie, beguiling new song by the folk duo Bad Flamingo, is not a country song. Country, even at its most minimal, is rarely as spidery in its structure, or as oblique in its lyrics, as “Bad Apple”. But there are a lot of commonalities between the work of Bad Flamingo and that […]
LCD Soundsystem’s “Losing My Edge”: An Unsparing Dance-Punk Character Study
The New York indie rock scene of the 2000s has already faded into legend; as ever with music, “fading into legend” means that someone wrote a book about it (Lizzy Goodman’s already-seminal Meet Me in the Bathroom) and most of the bands involved tour the hipster nostalgia circuit now (or Bernie Sanders rallies in the […]
The Dystopian Beauty of Laurel Halo’s Quarantine
It’s been about a week since self-quarantining started, and I’m holding up as well as I could expect given the situation. I’m staying inside as much as possible, which isn’t anything new, but I’m also making time for daily walks to get fresh air. I’m finding ways to keep myself busy and entertained; I’ve been […]
“Hear Your Heart” by Tom Peregrine
On his YouTube channel, Tom Peregrine has a video of himself performing a cover of The Tallest Man on Earth’s “To Just Grow Away”. You can see the similarities between the two artists just from a cursory listen; both are indie folk singers from Europe (The Tallest Man on Earth’s Kristian Matsson from Sweden, Tom […]
“Land of No Junction” by Aoife Nessa Frances
The trickiest part of reviewing music is deciding how much of yourself you want to put into a given piece. It does no one any good to write from a cold, objective point of view, because music is not a cold, objective medium; emotional responses are part of the equation for any good listener, […]
Feel narou’s Deep Pain in “You Are Gone”
If you were to make a list of the most influential artists of the past decade–not necessarily the most successful, but the ones who pointed the way forward–James Blake would likely be one of the first names you’d put down. At the start of the decade, he attracted notice as a triple threat: not only […]
Callous Copper by Chloe Foy
Ideally, chamber folk should find a balance between both sides of the equation. If the songwriting isn’t strong enough, a weak tune can be overpowered by cloying strings, like a thin cake buried beneath a mountain of frosting. But a creative arrangement can make a good song great, providing more than just background music for […]
Daydreaming with Christiana Zollner, “Big Field”
Big Field by Christiana ZollnerHailing from Willamette Valley, Oregon (which students of history in fifth grade may remember as the final destination of the Oregon Trail games), Christiana Zollner was immersed in music from a young age. Along with the rest of her family, she was a member of Z Musikmakers, a German folk group […]
