Reviews
Lorde Escapes to the Beach on Solar Power
What the fuck are perfect places, anyway? Those were the biting last words, the closing lyrics to Lorde’s Melodrama — an album that magnificently captured the blissful madness of being 20 years old: liquor-soaked limes and parties ‘til dawn; identity crises and cataclysmic breakups. That record, released in 2017, was addictively urgent, a work of social malcontent that furthered the disillusion of “Royals,” her world-beating breakthrough smash. Back in 2013, artists like Dave Grohl were welcoming then-16-year-old Ella Marija Lani Yelich-O’Connor to “the Nirvana aesthetic.” But now the alt-pop superstar has receded to her personal paradise, a serene beach where the singer can lay out, read her horoscope, listen to Celine Dion and be left the hell alone — turns out her perfect place had noth...
The Killers’ Pressure Machine Is a Chilling Small-Town Portrait
Pressure Machine, The Killers’ audacious new concept album, is so foreboding and grim — how foreboding and grim is it? — that Brandon Flowers may soon receive a cease-and-desist letter from Utah’s department of tourism. The band’s seventh studio LP (and second in 12 months) is a jarring departure from the maximalized arena-rock of 2020’s Imploding The Mirage, instead painting a grayscale portrait of small-town survival, specifically hinging on Flowers’ adolescent home of Nephi, Utah. It’s part country-rock retrospective, part Coen Brothers thriller and part This American Life, as The Killers commissioned an audio engineer — from NPR no less! — to record real-life residents of the northwestern valley town speaking candidly about their melan-bucolic lives. And these narratives, w...
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...
Brooklyn Nine-Nine Tiptoes Around Police Corruption in Its Final Season: Review
The Pitch: The Nine-Nine is back, baby, but the precinct just isn’t the same: The one-two punch of the COVID-19 pandemic and the post-George Floyd reckonings with the utility of American policing have left the gang more dispirited than ever. Rosa Diaz (Stephanie Beatriz) quits the force in disgust at her complicity and becomes a private detective; Hitchcock (Dirk Blocker) retires and mostly just hangs out with Scully (Joel McKinnon Miller) over FaceTime; the strain of being a Black precinct commander has even taken its toll on Capt. Holt’s (Andre Braugher) personal life. But can the gang pull together and do their jobs — and maybe even enact some positive change within the force? Reading the Room: Even for hardcore Brooklyn Nine-Nine fans (of which I consider myself one), th...
All Things Must Pass – Super Deluxe Edition: George Harrison’s Epic is Celebrated 50 Years On
I admit it, I bought three box sets of Beatles bootleg material when I was in Singapore two decades ago. What I liked most in that treasure trove were the Liverpudlian’s takes on the songs that would eventually emerge in George Harrison’s first true solo album. When it appeared as a triple-disc set, All Things Must Pass was heralded as proof that The Quiet Beatle had much more going on than his few songs that John and Paul found room for on the band’s albums. Unpacking the original vinyl release was like exploring a classical box set (Harrison’s Concert for Bangladesh replicated the experience a mere year later). Subsequent reissues of All Things Must Pass have maintained that sense of magnitude, and this 50th anniversary edition is no exception. The color treatment of the packaging ...
With Expected Biopic Cheese, Jennifer Hudson Pays Tribute to the Queen in Respect: Review
The Pitch: A groundbreaking biopic is an inherent contradiction. When a beloved star dies, mourning fans want to relive their magic, not wallow in their darkness. Productions usually must tread lightly on the darkness, anyway, to avoid a lawsuit from a subject’s estate. And in Aretha Franklin’s case, even two and a half hours is not enough time to unpack the ways a Black woman, a victim of sexual assault raised in the Jim Crow era-turned- international superstar, could become a “diva.” How does a dramatic retelling of a human being’s life avoid cliche? The Queen of Soul’s story has been told before — first in a 1999 memoir with David Ritz, then in a more honest biography by the author in 2014, and most recently in a National Geographic docuseries. But her film has been in development for n...
FX’s Reservation Dogs Is a Sweetly Incisive Series About Native American Life: Review
The Pitch: When we first meet the quote-unquote “Reservation Dogs,” a tight-knit gang of four Indigenous teens growing up in northeast Oklahoma, they’re making off with a stolen spicy chip delivery truck. It’s a risky, exciting gamble — they relish the danger of it more than the profit potential, right down to not wearing seatbelts — that should take them closer to their goal: saving up enough money to move away to California. The rez, they posit, killed their close friend Daniel a year ago, and they want to take his spirit with them when they finally escape. But amid the petty crimes and odd jobs they’ll take to scare up the scratch to leave, they’ll navigate the myriad pains everyone feels growing up, with the specific concerns and anxieties of Native American life — generational tr...
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...
Pink Siifu’s GUMBO! Is Good for the Soul
Pink Siifu’s latest release, GUMBO!, is another sprawling Afrocentric vision from one of the boldest voices in contemporary rap. Following up on 2020’s NEGRO, a genre-bending exploration of Black rage in the face of racist oppression, the album’s songs are as rich and varied as its titular stew. Siifu’s boundless style makes for an unpredictable but rewarding ride across the album’s 18 tracks, as he explores the diverse sounds of his influences and breaks new ground with a unique class of co-stars. Siifu, born Livingston Matthews and raised between Alabama and Cincinnati, has already notched a conspicuous list of collaborations in his burgeoning career, from legendary producer the Alchemist to Australian electronic group the Avalanches. These collabs reflect the ravenous appetite which inf...
On Happier Than Ever, Billie Eilish Brilliantly Tackles the Dark Side of Fame
“Last year, when I was at my lowest point during the tour in Europe, I was worried I was going to have a breakdown and shave my head,” Billie Eilish confessed in a 2020 Vogue cover story. The price of Eilish’s hard-won path to pop stardom has not been lost on her. It’s long hovered in the shadows of her work, but Happier Than Ever confronts the shift in her celebrity status head-on and once again pushes sonic boundaries. When Eilish released her debut album When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? in 2019, it altered the face of mainstream pop with its authenticity and transparency, catapulting Eilish to global success. It also irrevocably changed her relationship with fame forever. On Happier Than Ever, Eilish grapples with the paradox of celebrity culture — the realization of her dreams ...
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 ...
Rainbow in the Dark Admirably Chronicles Ronnie James Dio’s Iconic Career: Book Review
For years, Ronnie James Dio fans have been patiently waiting for an autobiography that he had begun work on prior to his passing in 2010 from stomach cancer. Now, we have finally received Rainbow in the Dark: The Autobiography. First off, readers should know that the idea behind the book was to recount the story of the legendary metal vocalist (real name: Ronald James Padavona) from birth up until his fulfillment of a lifelong career dream, when Dio headlined Madison Square Garden in 1986 (as the leader of his eponymous band). The book was not completed before Dio’s passing, but with the help of his wife/manager, Wendy Dio, and respected rock journalist Mick Wall, the missing bits have been filled in commendably. As a reader of many rock autobiographies over the years, I must admit that I ...
