Reviews
St. Vincent Finally Takes a Breath on Daddy’s Home
St. Vincent’s seventh album is her first ever to feel like an exhale, as the patently ambitious songwriter shrewdly forgoes much of the brazen — and regularly challenging — synth-rock spectacles of muses David Bowie and David Byrne. Instead, she’s settled in with the grit and shabby-chic glamor of early ‘70s Manhattan: heels on the subway, bodega roses, threats of love, violence and disillusion around every corner. Scenes from the city fuel the album’s lived-in and retro-tinged aesthetic, as do the sounds that dominated the periods’ airwaves, wedged between The Beatles and Sex Pistols: soul, soft-rock and psychedelia (plus a shitload of moody organs). The arrangements are familiarly nuanced and playful, as the artist born Annie Clark prefers to remain one step ahead, but Daddy’s Home manag...
Spiral: From the Book of Saw Gets Twisted in Its Own Formulas: Review
<span class="localtime" data-ltformat="F j, Y | g:ia" data-lttime="2021-05-12T19:26:47+00:00“>May 12, 2021 | 3:26pm ET The Pitch: It’s been a decade since John Kramer, aka Jigsaw, spent years terrorizing unsuspecting citizens with a dizzying, disgusting array of homespun torture traps meant to enact karmic justice for their personal failings. Now, a copycat is on the loose, and this time he’s targeting crooked cops, with a mission to “reform the police” (more on that later) and purge it of its corruption. Hot on the case is an idealistic but disillusioned cop named Zeke Banks (Chris Rock), the son of the department’s former chief (Samuel L. Jackson), already a pariah for turning in a crooked cop several years prior. Now he and his fresh-faced ...
REVIEW: Jae5’s “Dimension” Carries Cultural Expository With It, Were Afro Culture Is Significant
On Jae5’s “Dimension”, Rema’s hook and chorusing were full of self-expression and it was hot. Rema’s presence was a strong Afro-cultural significance representing a young Nigerian hustler who understands how to fend for his needs, extending the same compassion with his family. His lyrical XP relates to his hoodies (peers) he started hustling with and how most of them have been caged on various custody. He claims to come from another dimension, giving great essence to the theme of the record as He takes introspection into his past where he would never cease to forget the pains he took growing from day one to this point of his greatness. Rema’s pop significance story’s hustling Nigerians who push towards claiming the life they desire, and in between the hustle, they get to face with police b...
REVIEW: Apart From Braggadocio, Burna Boy’s “Kilometre” Is On Various Context
Kilometre can mean various contexts from Burna Boy’s music career in the midst of being one of the 2021 Grammy Award winners on the Best World Album categories. He is aware of his detractors and those who flare hate on him and his music, the greatness is what he seeks and what he has become so far so he joins braggadocio into the un-hypnotic pop levers in the successful creation of Kilometre, where he advises other musicians to learn from the teachers and tend to compare his staying power to iconic Nigerian Juju musician, Shina Peters. RELATED: LeriQ: Has Been Responsible for The Root Morphing of The ‘African Giant’ Burna Boy He claims to have walked many Kilometres, and the first context is his consistency despite the braggadocio that comes forth in the creation. Kilometre conceptualizes,...
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...
Weezer’s Van Weezer Is Hard-Rock Cosplay
In a 2019 interview, Weezer ringleader Rivers Cuomo spoke about their most recent self-titled album at the time, Weezer (a.k.a. the Black Album). “My main goal for any album at this point is for it to have at least one song that the audience at our shows every night wants to hear,” Cuomo said. He was uncertain that the Black Album would fulfill that goal, but that Weezer “would fail in a different way, which is exciting to me.” Cuomo goes on to describe himself as a resilient songwriter, and he’s right. He recognizes that fans likely won’t enjoy a new Weezer album nearly as much as 1994’s studio debut Weezer (or the Blue Album) or their second album, 1996’s Pinkerton, but that doesn’t preclude Cuomo’s lofty ambitions that Weezer will one day perform at a Super Bowl halftime show. That coul...
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...
The Growing Pains of AG Club’s Fuck Your Expectations
Favorably compared to A$AP Mob and Odd Future for their versatile sound and offbeat, self-made visuals, the Avant-Garde Club (AG Club) juggles listeners’ hopes and their own ambitions. On their latest two-part release, Fuck Your Expectations, the East Bay area hip-hop collective focus on their genre-bending, DIY sound and leave all judgments behind them. The haunting horror-game-random-encounter horn that opens lead single “COLUMBIA” almost jumps out of the instrumental, and it’s one of the most recognizable sounds on part one of F.Y.E. But on the album, it’s followed not by the boastful lyrics of rapper-writer Jody Fontaine but the astounded voice of Apple Radio’s Zane Lowe. “What is going on with this group?” he asks incredulously, replaying the song’s intro...
What Drives Us Is Dave Grohl’s Sweet Love Letter to the Road: Review
<span class="localtime" data-ltformat="F j, Y | g:ia" data-lttime="2021-04-29T18:45:44+00:00“>April 29, 2021 | 2:45pm ET The Pitch: What motivates rock stars to hit the road — enduring endless hours in a cramped van with smelly bandmates and mic stands poking you in the ribs, all to play a gig that could have 10,000 people or just 10? That’s the premise Foo Fighters frontman and rock legend Dave Grohl sets out to explore in his 90-minute documentary, What Drives Us. But amid his exhaustive interviews with music contemporaries both young and old, from St. Vincent to The Edge to Ringo Starr, Grohl’s journey evolves into something bigger: a quest to examine the appeal of the touring life in all its highs and lows and the soul-feeding nature of rock st...
Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse Misfires at Every Trite Turn: Review
<span class="localtime" data-ltformat="F j, Y | g:ia" data-lttime="2021-04-28T18:15:38+00:00“>April 28, 2021 | 2:15pm ET The Pitch: Here lie the life and tragic times of John Clark, aka John Kelly, aka Tom Clancy’s killer dude. Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse — the novel — is a post-Vietnam veteran thriller about a lost Navy SEAL who snaps and decides to take on drug lords and the Vietnamese after his pregnant wife dies in a car crash and his new girlfriend dies at the hands of her pimp. Yeah! That right there is what we used to call paperback intrigue, folks. Look it up at your nearest used-book store. Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse, the new Paramount-to-Amazon Prime thriller starring Michael B. Jordan, is about an elite SEAL, John Clark, whose very pregnan...
The Mosquito Coast Is a Slow Burn That Ultimately Pays Off: Review
<span class="localtime" data-ltformat="F j, Y | g:ia" data-lttime="2021-04-28T15:00:30+00:00“>April 28, 2021 | 11:00am ET The Pitch: Allie Fox (Justin Paul Theroux)– an ambitious yet incredibly flawed man — goes on the run with his family as government agents zero in on their location. Along the way, they find that peril comes in many forms and the consequences may outweigh even the loftiest ambitions. This seven-part series, adapted from Paul Theroux’s 1981 novel of the same name, highlights man’s flaws as well as the unrelenting power of the environment. The Unseen Friend and Foe: While the series may be about civilization’s own imperfections, it’s hard to miss the presence of Mother Nature. Throughout each episode, viewers are transported to stunning...
