Reviews
Taylor Swift’s evermore Continues the Personal Fable Begun on folklore: Review
The Lowdown: Once again, Taylor Swift was lying when she told us there was “not a lot going on at the moment.” Once again, she’s dropped a carefully curated collection of songs unraveling both her extremely public exterior and deeply personal interior life. And once again, it’s an album that acts as a remarkable exercise in lyricism. It’s not just a worthy follow-up to July’s folklore; it’s a mirror, a companion, and a bookend. Taylor had a few more things to say. The fable wasn’t finished yet. Like folklore, evermore was announced hours before release, framed as a “sister” project to the summer album that gave us the latest reinvention of Taylor Swift and successfully cemented her, even in many previously unconvinced eyes, as one of the strongest songwriters working today. evermore picks ...
Taylor Swift’s Evermore Is an Undeniable Folk-Pop Masterpiece
Somehow. Somehow, as the most psychologically daunting year of our lives refuses to loosen its grip, Taylor Swift continues to create with abandon, relentlessly surprising a fan base that hangs on her every tweet and emoji. Somehow, the pop monolith has done it almost entirely in isolation, sharing heaps of digital files with her latest songwriting soulmate, The National’s Aaron Dessner (as well as long-favored collaborator Jack Antonoff), and remotely patching together some three-dozen fully realized tracks from a makeshift home studio. Somehow, she’s polished off two career-redefining projects in five months. And somehow, despite the mastery and universal acclaim of July’s Folklore, its new sister album, Friday’s Evermore, is even stronger. Released two days befor...
The Avalanches Transport the Listener on We Will Always Love You: Review
The Lowdown: In a recent interview with the BBC, founding member of The Avalanches, Robbie Chater, said of We Will Always Love You, “We were thinking a lot about signal transmission and how every radio broadcast from the last hundred years is still floating out there in space … It’s a beautiful thought to me that all these broadcasts are still out there, surrounding us.” It’s easy to feel this focus in the album, an expansive cosmic compendium that finds its tracks crackling and churning into one another. The context of the album’s production — how the band was inspired by the idea that sampling old records is like summoning old spirits and by the recording of Ann Druyan’s heartbeat for the Golden Record just after Carl Sagan proposed to her — helps, but it isn’t strictly necessary. This a...
George Clooney’s The Midnight Sky Blandly Goes Where Plenty of Sci-Fi Has Gone Before: Review
The Pitch: It’s 2049, and the Earth is plagued by a mysterious apocalyptic event – details are scarce, but it seems as though the world is in its last gasps, and time is running out. Perhaps the only man left on Earth is Augustine Lofthouse (George Clooney), an astronomer dying of cancer who chooses to stay behind while the rest of the personnel evacuate their observatory in the Arctic Circle. As he whiles away the days and weeks waiting for the world to end, two events force him into action: the arrival of a mute girl (seven-year-old newbie Caoilinn Springall) seemingly left behind in the evacuation, and the realization that a spaceship called the Aether is on its way back to the planet. They’ve spent the last few years scoping out a new planet for humanity called K-23, and are comin...
Alex Wheatle Is A Rare Stumble for the Small Axe Anthology: Review
The Pitch: Before he was an award-winning author of books like Brixton Rock and Island Songs, Alex Wheatle (Sheyi Cole) spent a short time in prison following his involvement in the 1981 Brixton riots, an explosive confrontation between the police and the neighborhood’s Afro-Caribbean community. There, with the help of his Rastafarian cellmate Simeon (Robbie Gee), Alex looks back on his life — a childhood marred by mistreatment in foster care homes and bolstered by his budding career as a DJ in Brixton — and tries to figure out what to do, and who to be, next. Short But Sweet: Of the five films in writer/director Steve McQueen‘s anthology about the West Indian communities of London from the ’60s to the ’80s, Alex Wheatle is by far the shortest (clocking in at 65 minutes). Th...
Rico Nasty Expands Her Repertoire on Debut Nightmare Vacation: Review
The Lowdown: Rico Nasty has always been a powerhouse, existing on the edge of Soundcloud rap in the mid-2010s while still finishing high school. Her infectious, aggressive-yet-bubbly style made waves on the Internet early on, attracting the attention of Lil Yachty in 2016 to remix her song “Hey Arnold” and being featured in the hit HBO series insecure in 2017. Combining her eclectic fashion sense with spitfire raps that effortlessly bounce between sex and violence makes her one of the biggest pieces in the growing mosaic of this new era of female rappers. Her long-awaited debut album, Nightmare Vacation, takes a fine-tooth comb through the style that has made her one of the most influential rappers of the past few years. With seven mixtapes under her belt, Rico sounds like a seasoned veter...
Clearbody Up Their Game With One More Day
North Carolina’s Clearbody are starting fresh. Formed as Dollhands in 2019, the band shed their gritty sound, went through a lineup change and renamed themselves. The songs became fuller, the production richer. One More Day, their first album as Clearbody that will be released on Smartpunk, shows a band that took the necessary steps to get to the next level and establish their talent in the heavy shoegaze scene. The first single, “Blossom,” received positive feedback from listeners on social media. Released in October after Narrow Head’s 12th House Rock and shortly before Nothing’s The Great Dismal, the song resonated. Audiences who’ve been riding this wave of grunge-infused shoegaze that pays homage to My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive, and even the more punk Helmet could identify with the ra...
Miley Cyrus’ Plastic Hearts Lovingly Mashes Up Rawk Influences: Review
The Lowdown: For her post-divorce album, Plastic Hearts, Miley Cyrus deploys big synth energy in full ’80s-rawk drag. Over six uneven albums, Cyrus has dabbled across pop genres, but she’s always held a penchant for the era and attitude of mainstream glam, new wave, and hair rock, dropping covers of Joan Jett and Blondie in live sets and covering Poison’s “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” as early as 2010’s Can’t Be Tamed. Now 28 years old, Cyrus leans fully into these influences, enlisting heroes like Stevie Nicks to have a blast with her while ripping themselves off. Even without her current incarnation’s spunky sneer and platinum shag, Cyrus still has teeth, though this algorithmic “rock” can filter out her bite at times. Still, this might be Cyrus’ most successful pastiche yet. [embedded...
The Smashing Pumpkins’ CYR Treads Water in a Sea of Excess: Review
The Lowdown: Twenty-five years ago this fall, The Smashing Pumpkins released the most essential double album of the 1990s. Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness used every second of its 120-plus minutes to redefine the artistic possibilities of Billy Corgan and his band, moving away from the grunge comparisons that always chafed the mercurial frontman and towards something more expansive, stately, and baroque. That was 1995. One break-up, seven albums, and a Diamond certification later, The Smashing Pumpkins are once again presenting a double album for consideration. In a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times, Corgan described the new record (named for early Christian child-martyr St. Cyricus) as a reflection of the “spiritual dystopia” that haunts 2020. Sonically, that translates t...
Miley Cyrus Embraces Her Rock Star Destiny on Plastic Hearts
“It was ALL erased,” Miley Cyrus wrote in a letter to fans last month, explaining how the 2018 wildfire that destroyed her Malibu home took with it her unreleased seventh album. The LP would have slotted in around a trilogy of EPs, the first of which, She Is Coming, dropped in May 2019. But Miley being Miley — a chameleonic mega-star who’s never made the same album twice, pinballing between pop, hip-hop, country and psychedelia — she chose to redefine her sound yet again, abandoning both her lost songs and forthcoming EPs in favor of her latest obsession: rock royalty of a bygone era. Plastic Hearts, Cyrus’s incendiary new record, punctuates the 28-year-old singer’s greatest sonic reinvention yet — a retro-charged tribute to no-nonsense frontwomen: Debbie Harry and Heart’...
Shkodran Mustafi: Folarin Balogun very strong, intelligent
Arsenal defender, Shkodran Mustafi, was full of praise for Folarin Balogun after he struck in their Europa League win at Molde. The teenage striker scored with his first touches of the ball to open his account for the club, and earned rave reviews from his German team-mate. “He’s a very strong and intelligent player,” Mustafi told Arsenal.com. “He’s a good striker and he’s hungry. “I think at this age in strikers you can always see that hunger to score and they always want to do something in the box, and I think for him it was really nice. He came on in the last game as well and this time it was his first touch he scored with, so I’m very happy for him because I think this is something that is very important. “We all started as young boys and everyone knows the feeling of how difficult it ...
Santana’s Abraxas Still Casts a Mystical Spell Half a Century Later: Review
Consequence Podcast Network and Sony’s The Opus is back for Season 11 with a new host and a new classic album to explore. Click here to listen as host Jill Hopkins (The Moth Chicago, Making Beyoncé podcast) conjures the enduring legacy of Santana’s landmark Abraxas. Also, after you read this article, scroll below to enter our exclusive Santana giveaway or score some original Opus swag. — The story of Carlos Santana and the band that bears his name has been one of near-constant evolution. Critics and fans have attempted to tame Santana’s catalog over the years by sorting the group’s 25 studio albums by era, style, or lineup. That’s not a totally fruitless exercise. Nobody, for instance, will mistake the frenetic jam session that is Santana’s seminal 1969 debut for, say, the earthy jazz-fusi...
