Album Reviews

Kurt Vile – b’lieve i’m goin down…

September 24, 2015 Brendan O'Connor

For the past year or so, Kurt Vile’s last full length, Wakin on a Pretty Daze, has been my go to road trip album. The sound was so expansive, warm, and spacious, it almost seemed perfect compliment for a long drive in the sunshine. I guess that this might partially due the fact that the majority of the record was written by Vile while on the road, and I guess to me, that really showed. While Wakin on a Pretty Daze was far from his most depressing sounding release, the idea that every track was lyrically rooted in something dark was hard to escape, as is the case with most of Vile’s releases. His newest record, b’lieve i’m goin down…, might work on a road trip, but only the part of the road trip where night falls and your friend fell asleep in the passenger seat, and you are left[...]

Ryan Adams – 1989

September 22, 2015 Nick Muldoon

When Taylor Swift finally dropped 1989 last year, it’s success was hardly a surprise. The singer’s new album had felt like the final chapter in her carefully cultivated image as pop’s biggest underdog. Going back to her debut as a teenage country star who’s lyrics read with the vulnerability of a livejournal entry, she was pop music’s ultimate good-girl. But the moment Kanye stepped up on that stage, both were cast in roles in the public eye that would define them for years: Kanye the asshole and Taylor the victim. With every successive album since then, using her every girl persona her private life as the base of her lyrics, Swift increasingly drew a portrait of her life as someone constantly downtrodden, defiantly picking themselves up. In the process, her music became increasingly poppy and her songwriting grew sharper. This finally culminated in 1989, the triumphant pop album that with the[...]

Mac Miller – GO:OD AM

September 22, 2015 Joe Cardina

Finally. You log onto Spotify. You click the search bar. You frantically type in “mac.” You realize you could have probably just typed in “M” because what bigger “M” artist is there than Mac Miller? Your hand starts to shake as you click on the name, which may as well have been inscribed in #ffd700. After a quick scroll, you’re in. You try and double click on the intro track, “Doors,” but you miss the second click and have to repeat the process all over again. You miss the second attempt.“Fuck,” you utter to the empty room. You take a sip of the Miller Light classic logo aluminum bottle-can that you’ve fetched from the mini-fridge. It was originally intended for the most serene listening experience, however, now it’s become a tool to calm your nervous hands, just as it did at Alfred a couple years ago before that huge exam.[...]

Travis Scott – Rodeo

September 10, 2015 Brendan O'Connor

I have decided that I am going to create an award for the album that I am happiest that I didn’t overlook this year, just so I can preemptively give it to Travis Scott’s new album, Rodeo. Up until this point, I have been wildly unimpressed by the “new Atlanta” style of hip hop, as popularized by artists such as Migos, ILoveMakonnen, Young Thug, and Future, to name a few, and despite Scott hailing from Houston, the sound used on Rodeo is unmistakably similar. While there is no doubt that these artists do have massive potential on singles, their full length efforts have left too much to be desired in artistry and lyrical content. Surprisingly, this is far from the case on Rodeo. Without even listening to the record, if you take a look at the list of producers on the record, it is stacked with production talent like[...]

The Weeknd – Beauty Behind the Madness

August 25, 2015 Arianna Lang

At the age of 25, Canadian R&B singer The Weeknd is set to drop his second studio album, Beauty Behind the Madness, on Friday, and while the record is still pending an official release, nearly half of its tracks have already had success as chart-topping singles. Abdel Tesfaye, the man behind The Weeknd, possesses a uniquely contemporary sound that acts as a soundtrack for the restless and experimental youth of today, leading critics to categorize Tesfaye’s sound as PBR&B, a genre alternative to R&B. As a whole, Beauty Behind the Madness gives you what you’d expect from The Weeknd: sex, drugs, partying, more sex, and lots of falsetto. Despite Tesfaye’s frequent recycling of these themes, he manages to spin them in an irresistible way that will have you humming along, whether you want to or not. Following 2013’s Kiss Land, which was, in my opinion, a considerably mundane album, Beauty[...]

Beach House – Depression Cherry

August 25, 2015 Brendan O'Connor

At this point, you really have to hand it to Beach House. With a decade under their belts, the duo of Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally have managed to constantly put out well received material, drawing clear shoegaze influence and crafting it into their own dreamy, synth soaked sound, all while managing to create something special on each release. As my listen counter of the band’s newest release, Depression Cherry, began to rack up, I noticed something: this band has done an absolutely incredible job with recycling the same sound for their past four albums. No one has seemed to bat an eye as Beach House reuses their instrumental style of dream pop release after release, droning backing organ chord by droning backing organ chord, programmed drum beat by programmed drum beat. That being said, while their instrumentals have remained stagnant for the most part, the duo seems to have[...]

Mac DeMarco – Another One

August 11, 2015 Ronald Walczyk

So the Pepperoni Playboy has done it again. Who is the Pepperoni Playboy, you ask? And what exactly has he done? He is none other than the slacker king of “jizz jazz” (self-proclaimed), Mac DeMarco, and he’s just put out his first release since 2014’s Salad Days. DeMarco brings back his inner goofball on his newest mini-LP Another One, and lays it on thick this time. The new album is polished and tight, and doesn’t stray too far from the jangly wryness of its predecessor. Though it does stray a little. I remember first listening to Salad Days and thinking to myself how brilliant and engaging each of the album’s eleven tracks were, how each song told a different story and how I just wanted to lay in a dirty field somewhere and listen to the album on repeat. It’s an excellent album. Another One falls a bit short of[...]

Chelsea Wolfe – Abyss

August 9, 2015 Ailsa Forlenza

About a week after listening to Chelsea Wolfe’s new album, Abyss, out on Sargent House Records, I had a lucid dream of what it was like to suffer from sleep paralysis. In the dream, I woke up, but my body was still, unmoving. A shadowy, demonic figure attempted to attack me, as I screamed obscenities and chants to make it go away. I woke up, finally, only to realize it had been an illusion. Upon waking up, again, in my bedroom in Buffalo, I felt disturbed and a little violated. This is a condition that Ms. Wolfe deals with frequently. Sleep studies say these figures, aka “hypnagogic hallucinations,” are a combination of the fact that we are still dreaming and the ability to access collective realms beyond the mind. While someone is experiencing sleep paralysis, their amygdala (what controls our fear systems) gets jacked up, and if we’re still dreaming, this projects[...]

Adult Mom – Momentary Lapse of Happily

August 7, 2015 Brendan O'Connor

I remember a couple months ago, sitting on the floor of a living room on the West Side, hearing Stephanie Knipe’s music live for the first time. Armed with just an electric guitar, Knipe, front woman of Purchase, NY’s Adult Mom, proceeded to perform one of the best solo sets I have ever seen: simple guitar chords matched with some undisguised, brutally honest lyrical content, delivered in just the right way. It really gave me a whole new appreciation for her music as a whole, and I was delighted to hear she had a new full length on the way. Titled Momentary Lapse of Happily, the new Adult Mom record is just what I expected in a way. Its an album about breakups, abusive relationships, gender, and emotional turmoil, which comes off as one of the most brutally personal releases I have heard this year. And after having listened to[...]

Titus Andronicus – The Most Lamentable Tragedy

July 30, 2015 Brendan O'Connor

Believe it or not, if you were at the Titus Andronicus show at the Tralf Music Hall in 2013, you were among the first people in the world to hear tracks off of the band’s latest effort, The Most Lamentable Tragedy. While two years seems like a stretch from the first announcement of an album and its release date, after hearing it all the way through for the first time, it all makes a bit more sense now. This album is not only the band’s most ambitious release to date, but their most uncompromising, mentally engaging, and liveliest. The Jersey outfit really outdid themselves on this one, a tough task after some of their past work, crafting a 29 song, 93 minute “rock opera” of sorts, cited by front man Patrick Stickles as having underlying meanings rooted in manic depression and how it has affected him throughout his life. These[...]

Pitbull – Dale

July 22, 2015 Joe Cardina

You hear those three ascending piano notes. You stop what you’re doing and turn your full attention to the wondrous arpeggiation that just tongued your earholes. You hear the same three notes, descend back to where they came from. You start to see spots. You start to sweat. You’re not sure if you’ve just defecated yourself. But you don’t care either way. “Mr. Worldwide” is the first phrase you hear– and then you’re there. You’ve hit nirvana. Then your internet connection cuts out. You spew the following spell of words that garners a small crowd outside of your apartment window– “What the fuck! I just had my moment of inner-most peace and YOU ruined it, Time Warner. YOU are responsible for this sham of a wifi connection that just stopped me from streaming the last three minutes and forty-four seconds of ‘Piensas (Dile la Verdad)’ feat. Gente De Zona, which[...]

Wilco – Star Wars

July 20, 2015 Justin Kloczko

On “Cold Slope,” the 9th song off Wilco’s new album, Star Wars, Jeff Tweedy sings, “Some say you’re never really there, but you still take up space.” That line could be an indictment of the band over the past several years: touring endlessly but producing fewer albums. After a decade of hiring-and-firing, Tweedy and co. have been in cruise control with the same lineup for over 10 years now. What kind of band is Wilco today? They have mostly abandoned their experimental skin (which was really credited to Jay Bennett), and have since been approaching Springsteenian levels with their marathon live shows, pulling from a deep catalog. More and more, after 2009’s Wilco (The Album), which played out like a cheap greatest hits collection, and their last album, the uneven Whole Love, it seemed the band had reached their Grateful Dead moment: their studio albums don’t turn heads anymore, but[...]

Tame Impala – Currents

July 13, 2015 Joe Cardina

Thanks to a Facebook post from my friend Matt, it has come to my attention that “Tame Impala is the Instagram of rock bands.” This comes as a part of a multiple-hundreds of words rant from this album review of Currents. First of all, if you read it, Will Neibergall writes a solid review of the CD, and he makes a point that can be argued for or against. It’s short and to the point, and it sparked a good ol’ Facebook discussion that I’m sure my friend Matt’s going to be notified of for the next couple days. And it definitely has been getting it’s click throughs and complaints. However I’m here to deconstruct it. “Tame Impala is the Instagram of rock bands.” It irks me to hear this bouncing around in my head. There are tidbits of the review and Mr. Neibergall’s analogy that ring true: “Instagram used to[...]

Neil Young and Promise of the Real – The Monsanto Years

July 1, 2015 Tim Fenster

Sure, in writing it sounded like a good idea, or at the very least a ballsy and righteous one. Neil Young, one of rock’s most dedicated social and environmental activists, dedicating the space of an entire LP to taking down one of the most controversial corporations in modern America, Monsanto Company, your trusted neighborhood manufacturer of carcinogenic PCBs, genetically-modified farming seeds and various herbicides. But political art – be in poetry, literature or music – is a delicate balancing act, and usually necessitates a less-or-more approach. This is the central problem for Neil Young and Co. on The Monsanto Years: he drives home the same points so heavy-handed and incessantly that his message grows dull and befuddled long before the record’s end. Attempts to clarify his argument – on “A Rock Star Bucks A Coffee” he addresses legislative efforts to have GMO foods labeled, and the company’s responding lawsuits –[...]