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(11/17/11 10:00am)
If you don’t want a lovesick pop song written about you, don’t date Gareth Campesinos! Throughout Hello Sadness, the lead singer of Los Campesinos! writes cathartic lyrics about a traumatic breakup. As can be expected from the Welsh pop group, the songs are refreshingly honest—Gareth never sugarcoats his grief. During “The Black Bird, The Dark Slope,” demonic birds feast upon Gareth’s innards, a straightforward allusion to the torture of Prometheus. “Baby I Got the Death Rattle” burns away the skin of his palms using a Bic lighter. Reveries about the female body—“swan necks curled between pelvis with stretch marks and shoulders and those freckled legs”—convey his sexual frustration. The album functions both as confession and elegy, treating his sorrow with his histrionic poetry.
(11/10/11 10:00am)
Welcome to the two sides of Bradford Cox. In this corner stands a lonely man, nervous and overworked, shielded from the spotlight and disappointed by fame. In the opposite corner, Cox takes to the stage, puts on the musician’s mask and turns sorrowful water into tea. From the first line, Parallax has its cake and eats it, too: “Found money and fame but I found them really late,” Cox sings, slurring the last word to also imply the rhyme, “lame.” The play on words allows Cox to be at once disappointed with his forestalled celebrity and the celebrity itself. Throughout the album, art is portrayed through a dialectic, as something both mesmerizing and disruptive. During “Mona Lisa,” onlookers at the Louvre forget outlandish fantasies at the cost of forgetting their children. The value of art can only be measured through parallax—the apparent distance between two different points of view.
(11/03/11 12:02pm)
Warning: Listening to Replica may cause unforeseen side effects. The new album of Oneohtrix Point Never (a.k.a Daniel Lopatin) has been known to induce cabin fever, belief in the afterlife and visions of extraterrestrials. Listeners should not operate complicated machinery. Consumption of alcohol while listening to Replica is strongly discouraged. Blast the album and children will be afraid to take your Halloween candy.
(10/20/11 8:00am)
If Disney ever makes an indie princess film, Shara Worden should sing lead. With All Things Will Unwind, the opera-trained vocalist of My Brightest Diamond creates an album that is both alternative and cinematic. Each song invents a new set of dramatis personae, places them in enchanted woods and watches as they dance and sing. Like Disney’s best, she exudes confidence—never toning down her abnormally high-pitched voice, always comfortable in her eccentricity.
(10/06/11 9:51am)
Since his debut album, Joshua Davis, a.k.a. DJ Shadow, has been, well, overshadowed. His recent albums have matched neither the quality nor the hype of 1996’s Endtroducing, the album that launched a thousand turntablists. The Less You Know, the Better comes fifteen years later, from an artist looking to reestablish his artistic stature after the failure of 2006 LP, The Outsider. DJ Shadow, however, is not one to return to his roots. Rather than mimic Endtroducing, Shadow treats each release as an experiment, producing albums that are sometimes spotty but never boring.
(09/29/11 8:00am)
Zakir Hussain is India’s equivalent of a rock star.
(09/15/11 8:00am)
It’s difficult to discuss Girls without mentioning the backstory of frontman Christopher Owens. Raised by a single mother as a member of the extremist cult Children of God, Owens never spent a single day inside a classroom. Instead, before escaping to the States, he earned money performing religious folk songs on the streets of Europe. At age 25, Owens met bassist Chet White in San Francisco and together they released Girls’ critically acclaimed first album.
