Album Reviews
Kanye West Channels His Vulnerability on Donda, Delivering His Best Album in Years
Two of the most confounding words in music are “Kanye” and “West.” For the past few years, Kanye West has been less of an artist and more of a Rorschach test for a worldwide audience. To some, he’s a genius on par with John Lennon, Beethoven, Steve Jobs, and Leonardo Da Vinci. To others, he’s a drama king attracted to the spotlight like a moth to a flame. To a third group, he’s a fallen prophet who traded in his goodwill for a red cap and a White House hall pass. However you rate his flaws, Kanye admittedly never hid them, even all those moons ago when the world said he was hip hop’s Messiah in 2004. Seventeen years later, after dealing with the ups and downs that come from living one’s life in a fishbowl for the world to see, Ye is back with Donda, his tenth album. Named after his mother,...
Turnstile Gloriously Defy Genre Conventions on Glow On: Review
The Lowdown: After earning well-deserved buzz with their 2018 sophomore album, Time & Space, Baltimore’s Turnstile continue their sonic evolution on their new genre-defying effort, Glow On. It would be easy to just call Turnstile a hardcore band, but that only scratches the surface of the music that this adventurous quintet creates. The Good: Fans of Turnstile’s hardcore roots are treated to their fair share of heavy tracks on Glow On, but those songs are balanced with melodic alt-rock tunes that shine just as brightly. A handful of the songs on Glow On also appeared on the Turnstile Love Connection EP that preceded the full-length by two months, one of which is the infectious leadoff track “Mystery.” A candidate for best rock song of the year, “Mystery” roars with a Nirvana-like guita...
Big Red Machine’s How Long Do You Think It’s Gonna Last? Brings Late Summer Melancholy
On their sophomore outing as Big Red Machine, Aaron Dessner (The National) and Justin Vernon (Bon Iver) take their time. The end of August is here — much like last year’s folklore, an album with writing and production contributions from both artists, this period has arrived with an album that revels in the dog days of summer. Bon Iver and The National are two acts that followed similar timelines during their respective ascents within the indie rock world. (Perhaps the best way to contextualize their initial connection is with the reminder that Dessner and Vernon first became friends over MySpace.) There’s a gentleness associated with their music, both from their individual endeavors and from work together, and How Long Do You Think It’s Gonna Last? fits that same bill, bobbing steadily ove...
With If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power, Halsey Crafts Her Own Mythology
When Halsey shared the artwork for her fourth studio album, If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power, the inspiration was clear: seated on a throne, confidently exposed with a child in her arms, she is the regal image of the Madonna. Halsey (who goes by the pronouns “she/they”) has always seemed fascinated by the stories that make up humanity, from the mythic to the biblical and fantastical. If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power is the next chapter in her own tale. This marks the fourth studio album for Halsey, who is on the cusp of turning 27 — her debut LP, Badlands, shot the singer into the spotlight when she was just 20 years old. Her bracing honesty and electronic production helped her cultivate a dedicated following of young adults, many of whom have grown with her in the years since that deb...
Meet Me @ the Altar Rewrite the Handbook on Easycore and Pop-Punk With Model Citizen EP
Pop-punk is having its time in the sun once again, as different iterations of the genre swim around the Billboard Hot 100 and streaming charts. This time, though, a new class of pop stars and rappers are taking the reins. While the genre itself has never disappeared completely from the mainstream, very few pop-punk groups have held onto their roots and excelled throughout the last ten years. Before the relatively short days of Lil Peep and Juice WRLD’s bursts of emo-inflected rap across radio stations and online publications, pop-punk had, for many, become a symbol of a dying era — it was a genre to be defended to some, and a genre to be forgotten to others. Enter Consequence’s August Artist of the Month Meet Me @ the Altar, a trio who found each other on the internet and bonded over their...
With King’s Disease II, Nas’ Second Reign Is Better Than His First
A good sequel is rare. Every now and then, we get a part two on par or better than the original, but for every Dark Knight, there are 50 Hangover Part IIs. It’s a feat even more challenging in music, because each album is about a particular time in an artist’s life. Asking for a new version of that same thing is basically asking them to hop in a time machine and relive the past. Which, until someone says otherwise, is impossible. Never one to shy away from an impossible task, Nas surprised the world when he announced King’s Disease II, a sequel to his Grammy-winning 13th album, just one week ago. Out today, August 6th, it finds the rapper and producer Hit-Boy continuing their flourishing tag-team partnership. Their first endeavor, released in August 2020, felt designed to make fans fo...
Billie Eilish Is Happier Than Ever: How the Brutally Honest, Introspective Album Proves She’s Here to Stay
The thing about comets is that they were initially perceived as disturbances to our earth’s atmosphere; an anomaly, an intrusion. It wasn’t until Edmond Halley predicted the trajectory of a comet, accurately calculating its return, that people started to accept comets as something out of our reach, circling beyond the moon. Halley’s Comet was immortalized. The halfway mark of Billie Eilish’s sophomore album, Happier Than Ever, is a track called “Halley’s Comet.” It’s melancholy and yearning, but it acts as an appropriate connector between the first and second halves of the album — as well as the gap between her first album (the lauded, Grammy history-making When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?) and her latest effort. With this collection, she proves that she was not just a shot in the ...
At the Gates Open the Door to Experimentation on The Nightmare of Being: Review
The Lowdown: Swedish death metal giants At the Gates made one of heavy music’s most influential albums – 1995’s Slaughter of the Soul, which had a huge influence on the wave of American metalcore that followed it. In 2014, the band returned after a long hiatus, and have since delivered two respectable albums that mostly follow the template that they created in the ’90s. Their latest effort, The Nightmare of Being, bucks that trend in favor of wild experimentation. The Good: While Slaughter of the Soul solidified the melodic death metal template — Iron Maiden riffs over thrash beats filtered through the famed Swedish Buzzsaw guitar tone, with a little industrial here and there to spice things up — in some ways it ended that genre’s period of vast exploration. The irony is that At the Gates’...
McKinley Dixon Deftly Navigates Grief and Healing on For My Mama and Anyone Who Look Like Her: Review
<span class="localtime" data-ltformat="F j, Y | g:ia" data-lttime="2021-05-07T15:45:52+00:00“>May 7, 2021 | 11:45am ET The Lowdown: From the first track of McKinley Dixon’s For My Mama and Anyone Who Look Like Her, you’ll be floored by the Richmond, Virginia-based artist’s ability to marry extremely personal storytelling with dazzling, and often unpredictable, instrumentation. The final installment in a five-year trilogy, the record builds on the legacy of 2016’s Who Taught You to Hate Yourself? and 2018’s The Importance of Self Belief. Across each of these works, Dixon sounds like a highly-trained musician, with melodic arrangements that induce a visceral reaction. Coupled with his gripping delivery and impeccable lyricism, it’s hard to believe Dixon h...
Weezer’s Van Weezer Is All Big Riffs with Little Payoff: Review
<span class="localtime" data-ltformat="F j, Y | g:ia" data-lttime="2021-05-06T22:09:22+00:00“>May 6, 2021 | 6:09pm ET The Lowdown: We’ve spent the first months of 2021 wrestling with some truly difficult questions. How will the pandemic end? Can America recover from its increasingly violent political polarization? Is Weezer actually good again? While the answers to those first two are still forthcoming, the last one seemed more straightforward — upon its surprise arrival in January, the band’s 14th studio album, OK Human, delivered some of Weezer’s most lyrically confessional and musically adventurous songs in recent memory. That record largely succeeded thanks to its grounded relatability, two words which seem unlikely to describe the followup to OK Hu...
Iceage Bring the Storm on Fifth Album Seek Shelter: Review
<span class="localtime" data-ltformat="F j, Y | g:ia" data-lttime="2021-05-04T04:00:21+00:00“>May 4, 2021 | 12:00am ET The Lowdown: Danish rock experimentalists Iceage will return with their fifth album Seek Shelter on May 7, just a few days past the three-year anniversary of their 2018 acclaimed album Beyondless. Seek Shelter acts as Iceage’s own sonic laboratory, where they test hypotheses about introducing a significantly wider array of soundscapes into their catalogue. Seek Shelter is proof positive that these experiments paved the way to successful results, as it’s the band’s most inventive album to date. Their latest not only illustrates the breadth of Iceage’s range, but also that they’re not afraid to creatively roll the dice — and in the case o...
Dropkick Murphys Turn Up That Dial with a New Collection of Sing-Along Punk Anthems: Review
<span class="localtime" data-ltformat="F j, Y | g:ia" data-lttime="2021-04-30T18:05:08+00:00“>April 30, 2021 | 2:05pm ET The Lowdown: Dropkick Murphys have been going strong for 25 years, churning out infectious Celtic punk anthems and playing to raucous fans at sold-out shows all over the world. The Massachusetts band is back with its 10th album, Turn Up That Dial, marking the veteran outfit’s first new LP in more than four years. Founding co-vocalist Ken Casey stopped playing bass after a 2018 motorcycle accident left him with nerve damage in his fingers, leaving him to roam the front of the stage with co-vocalist Al Barr. After a couple hundred shows performed like this supporting 2017’s 11 Short Stories of Pain & Glory, this new dynamic has spar...
