“Keeps Me Running” by Esther Rose: Sweet, Upbeat Indie Music
Esther Rose’s music takes us on a journey through places, experiences, and moments through country indie-pop numbers. She has the sensational ability to build a world around you through song, a world that’s warm and inviting and feels like home. Listening to her music is like stopping at a friend’s house out in the country […]
“Satisfied” by The Staves: Warm Indie Folk with Familial Chemistry
There’s something special about music made by a family. The Staves is made up of three sisters, Emily, Jessica, and Camilla, whose lives revolved around music from the beginning. Influenced by legendary rock artists like The Beatles and Simon & Garfunkel, the trio made their mark back in 2012 with their first album, Dead & […]
“Snow Day” by Shame: Not Just a Song, but a Journey
If there is one style of music which I’ve never really been opposed to, yet never gone looking for, it would have to be spoken word. Regardless of the instrumentation or genre, I’ve always been really big on melodies in songs. In my journey of placing such a large emphasis on melodies as opposed to […]
“Paper Fog” by Cory Hanson: Unearthing an Underappreciated Genre
To my knowledge, a subset of musical genres which seems less explored than it should be is acoustic-psychedelic rock. Some of my favorite music from legendary psychedelic-rock band, Pink Floyd, comes from their work in the early 1970s, which incorporated a lot of this sound into the albums which they were producing. To me, there […]
“Wider Spaces” by Seafarers: A Relatable Musing
Songs can be an avenue to transcend time and space, using hooks to take us back to cherished memories or transporting us to a bygone era with an iconic guitar riff. However, they can also be immensely powerful reflections of our own feelings. It’s into this camp the luxurious jazz-folk track “Wider Spaces” falls. This […]
Retrospective Reviews: Lisa Germano’s “…A Psychopath”
Content warning: this song and article contains descriptions of sexual violence. Why are people fascinated by horror? Every year it seems like there’s a new pantheon of horror movies released to scare us senseless—it really feels like we have a bizarre obsession with terror. But the stories that are most terrifying to us are the […]
“Sugar Hill” by Rose Rose: Sparkling, Effervescent Pop
Rose Rose is an intriguing project. A duo, these two young producers are entirely self-taught musicians working between Paris and London. Their debut single synthesizes a culmination of two years of sonic research, a debut that is already astounding to begin with, without even considering just how young these producers are. “Sugar Hill,” the first […]
George Boomsma’s “Chinatown”: A Unique, Silky Smooth Sound
It is no secret that within each broader category of music there are innumerable facets of subgenres and sounds. There’s no precise blueprint for what makes a song its genre, but rather a few threads of commonality within structure, lyric, and arrangement that are found. When it comes to the bubble of indie music, this […]
Retrospective Review: The Sugarcubes’ “Birthday”
“We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives.” This is a statement likely to rouse popular affinity because its sentiment is widely relatable. Many of us, have at one point or another, been victim to love’s vampiric seduction and bear concealed scars that we relish […]
Retrospective Review: “Holes” by Mercury Rev
What kinds of things make you wonder? As you travel through life, what do you notice? Do you ever question why a bird would choose this tree instead of another in which to lay its eggs? Or why the dried up worm on the sidewalk didn’t have the wherewithal to stay in the dirt? These […]
