Album Reviews
The Killers’ Imploding the Mirage Goes All in on a Better Tomorrow: Review
The Lowdown: The Killers have always sounded like a band born to run. Living in the desert of Las Vegas will have that effect. For 16 years, Brandon Flowers and company have been running away down highway skylines, on the backs of hurricanes with Springsteen-like abandon. However, until now, they’ve always seemed to be running from what plagues them — fears, depressions, and the oppressive trappings of Small Town America — instead of toward what inspires them. Despite Flowers’ advice on Wonderful Wonderful single “Run for Cover”, The Killers have always seemed to have one eye looking back over their shoulder as they blow across an expansive wilderness, seeking some sort of escape from it all through romantic, heartland lyricism and rock and roll bombast. 2017’s Wonderful Wonderful caught T...
Bright Eyes’ Down in the Weeds, Where the World Once Was Dances Through Grief and Love: Review
The Lowdown: It’s been nearly 10 years since Bright Eyes released an album, and somehow everything and nothing has changed. Gone, this time for good — as Conor Oberst once declared — is the “rootsy Americana bullshit” that colored career-defining records like I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning. Sonically, the reunited trio’s newest work has one foot in the stylized hyper-production of their last album, The People’s Key, and another in the Gothic, orchestral sweep of Lifted or The Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground. Sure, some of the old emblems remain: the cryptic overture, the half-sentimental, half-ominous soundbites, Oberst’s brooding and beautiful lyrical histrionics. And yet, the album isn’t an outright gloomy one. In the past decade, the members of Bright Eyes have grown up....
Alanis Morissette’s Such Pretty Forks in the Road Shines Light into the Depths: Review
The Lowdown: Alanis Morissette is back! After an eight-year hiatus, one of the ’90s pinnacle pioneers of alt rock is sweeping back into the spotlight with her ninth studio album, Such Pretty Forks in the Road. After four years of work and a three-month delayed release due to COVID-19, the album applies a trademark Morissette treatment — cutting lyrics and a voice that howls and croons and whispers as deftly as an arrow — to questions of adulthood, responsibility, and creativity to greater and more complete effect than what we’d last seen from her. The resulting album is extremely haunting, immaculately polished, and complexly kind. The Good: Such Pretty Forks in the Road finds Morissette exploring the tenuousness of fame, youth, and passion but in a way that thwarts that tenuousness in its...
The Psychedelic Furs’ Made of Rain Is a Confident, Trippy, and Wonderful Comeback: Review
The Lowdown: Few British post-punk/new wave acts made as big a splash in the 1980s as The Psychedelic Furs. Led by the illustrious vocals and bass playing, respectively, of bothers Richard and Tim Butler — and with tracks such as “Pretty in Pink”, “Heaven”, and “Love My Way” becoming huge hits — the group was as much a part of that zeitgeist as any of their genre peers. Sadly, they went on hiatus following the release of 1991’s World Outside, and although the pair continued to create with Love Spit Love prior to a Furs live reunion at the turn of the millennium, fans have been clamoring for a proper new record for nearly three whole decades. Thankfully, it’s finally arrived, and it’s as exhilarating and charming a return as anyone could’ve wanted. [embedded content] Joining the main duo th...
Taylor Swift’s folklore Dismantles Her Own Self-Mythologizing: Review
The Lowdown: Born of isolation, Taylor Swift’s eighth album, folklore, interrogates the pop star’s self-mythologizing and turns her gaze outward. Created during the ongoing pandemic, Swift collaborated remotely on 11 songs with Aaron Dessner of The National, who shared orchestrations composed inside his own quarantine. The results lean toward modern folk and glitchy experimentation, abandoning pop bombast but not the drama of swelling strings or anxious percussion. The accompanying visuals depict a gloomy summer, and listeners can imagine Swift watching storms barrel across the Atlantic horizon and wandering old-growth forests in half-done braids, alone or with a companion socially distanced beyond the frame. Dropped on 24 hours’ notice without her typically painstaking roll-out, the 16 mo...
Courtney Marie Andrews’ Old Flowers Finds Growth in Moving On: Review
The Lowdown: Old Flowers, Courtney Marie Andrews’ fifth full-length LP, is an album about heartbreak and growth. After a nine-year relationship that began at the tender age of nineteen, Andrews realized it was time for her to move on and grow on her own. In her own words, “Anytime I felt like myself, I was alone and wandering, and I knew that was a sign that it was time for change.” This is a tale as old as time for many, when you realize the love you share with someone cannot grow anymore. As Andrews puts it herself in the title track, “You can’t water old flowers,” meaning, you can’t force something to grow that’s already dead. Andrews understood it was time to take the reins of her life herself, as scary as that would be, and she does this with as much grace as possible on her new album...
The Chicks’ Gaslighter Galvanizes The Trio’s Long-Awaited Return: Review
The Lowdown: The most infamous act in country music, The Chicks (formerly known as the Dixie Chicks), stopped releasing new music 14 years ago, after their seventh album, Taking the Long Way, netted five Grammys. These included Album of the Year, plus Record of the Year and Song of the Year for “Not Ready to Make Nice”, which settled any lingering questions about whether they regretted their 2003 criticism of George W. Bush (they did not). Gaslighter marks the trio’s official return, and a lot has changed, both in the surrounding world and in the sound of The Chicks’ music. But some crucial elements remain the same: their attention is firmly focused ahead of them and on the things they care for. In the songs that focus on deteriorating relationships, and notably lead singer Natalie Maines’...
Pop Smoke’s Shoot for the Stars, Aim for the Moon Secures the Late Rapper’s Legacy: Review
The Lowdown: Last summer, at a congested intersection in Flatbush, the hip-hop rule book was left to smolder in a fiery, steel mesh garbage can. Passersby extinguished the fire, but by then Pop Smoke had already scored an improbable hit with “Welcome to the Party”. Pop Smoke (born Bashar Jackson) hardly seemed destined for superstardom; only a Noo Yawker could love those carelessly dropped “R’s” and that honking bassone cadence. And “Welcome to the Party”, with its retro drum’n’bass synth riff, could have been recorded between rounds one and two of the Bush tax cuts. It was the song that time forgot. Yet, it was streamed 80 million times. Coming to a barber shop near you is Shoot for the Stars, Aim for the Moon, Pop Smoke’s posthumous new album. (He was killed in a February home invasion; ...
Static-X’s Project Regeneration Vol. 1 Properly Cements Wayne Static’s Legacy: Review
The Lowdown: In the late ’90s and early 2000s, Static-X were one of the bands the helped define that industrial/nu-metal era. Their debut album Wisconsin Death Trip went platinum with the video for “Push It” earning rotation on MTV (back when the channel still played videos). Over the next decade, Static X would release five more albums before drifting apart in 2009. When the band’s singer Wayne Static tragically passed away in 2014, it seemed to signal the end of Static-X forever; that was until original bassist Tony Campos uncovered demos of material that Wayne had been working on. Campos got together with fellow original members Ken Jay (drums) and Koichi Fukuda (guitar), and reworked the unearthed demos along with outtakes from previous albums. While there was an initial plan to recrui...
My Morning Jacket’s The Waterfall II Offers a Slice of Thoughtful Summer Escapism: Review
The Lowdown: In our diseased and never-ending present, 2015 feels like a hell of a lot longer ago than just five years. That April, My Morning Jacket released The Waterfall, a record that our Sheldon Pearce praised for its “stunning sonic scenery” and “perceptive, generation-bending kind of songwriting about lost love and nostalgia.” In addition to producing their best-received record since 2005’s breakthrough, Z, the sessions at Panoramic House in Stinson, CA, also produced a second album’s worth of material that Jim James and company decided to save until they needed them most. At the time, James told critic Steven Hyden in an interview for Grantland that “the two records aren’t related or anything” and that he “[didn’t] want to put it out as, like, The Waterfall 2 or anything like that....
HAIM’s Women in Music Pt. III Brims with Nuance and a Smorgasbord of Sounds: Review
The Lowdown: Summertime milestones are shaping up to become a staple in HAIM’s career. Just about a week shy of the three-year anniversary of the release of their sophomore album, Something to Tell You, the trio — composed of sisters Danielle, Alana, and Este Haim — put their latest work, Women in Music Pt. III, out into the world. Like the adorable video of their parents opening their Women in Music Pt. III vinyl in matching “Go HAIM or Go Home” t-shirts (which, if it isn’t already, should definitely be added to all future merch tables) that the band posted on Instagram, the album contains a raw tenderness that drums up its own sense of quiet magic on each track. Equally cool and cozy, Women in Music Pt. III sees HAIM tackle incredibly vulnerable subject matter against a musical smorgasbo...
Run the Jewels’ RTJ4 Takes Aim at Systemic Oppression amid National Uprising: Review
The Lowdown: Run the Jewels 4, which was released on June 3rd (two days earlier than originally announced), couldn’t have come at a better time. The duo, comprised of hip-hop mainstays Killer Mike and El-P, have ostensibly grown since their 2013 self-titled debut album. It’s imperative to recognize that the… Please click the link below to read the full article. Run the Jewels’ RTJ4 Takes Aim at Systemic Oppression amid National Uprising: Review Matt Melis You Deserve to Make Money Even When you are looking for Dates Online. So we reimagined what a dating should be. It begins with giving you back power. Get to meet Beautiful people, chat and make money in the process. Earn rewards by chatting, sharing photos, blogging and help give users back their fair share of Internet revenu...
