20. Monophonics – It’s Only Us [Colemine] The Bay Area’s indelible psychedelic soul, live-show phenomenon, Monophonics have just released their third full-length, It’s Only Us. It combines the raw funk and sheer power of early soul masters with a touch… Read More
In the waning days of the Grinch-y year of 2020, we’re all hunkering down and barely holding up. Holiday rituals that once brought comfort and joy have become inadvisable, if not unthinkable. The trite Christmas music blaring from stores as… Read More
Marion Lafournier is a listless accountant who is ambivalent about his relationship to his North Minnesotan hometown, and for good reason. Defined by addiction, gang affiliations, corruption, and familial disputes turned deadly, the fictional town of Geshig is a veritable… Read More
10. Julianna Barwick — Healing is a Miracle [Ninja Tune] Julianna Barwick’s new album of ambient vocal-loop devotionals is her shortest and catchiest, as well as one of her best. The layers of voices are less sumptuous than on her career-making Magic… Read More
20. Lee Jones – Down Into Light [Independent] If One Grain saw Jones tinkering with a more subdued approach, Down Into Light takes things a step further. This new LP, his first full-length since Electronic Frank, is lighter, more buoyant,… Read More
For so long, Taylor Swift has been the girl who sang her heart out about her string of celebrity boyfriends, seemingly to their eventual detriment. (As if a teenage girl writing award-winning songs about her feelings was unworthy of consideration… Read More
The Tate-LaBianca murders, commonly called the Charles Manson murders, have inspired countless films, some direct and some indirectly based on those events of August 1969. Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood (2019) proved the continuing cinematic viability of those… Read More
How many times, how many ways, could we tell the force and effect of the cultural-political winds throughout the years not by simply reading the news or the trends on social media, but by observing, and feeling, what is going… Read More
Susan Alcorn – Pedernal (Relative Pitch) By now, creative music folks know Susan Alcorn for her feat in bringing the pedal steel guitar to the downtown music scene, with guitarist Mary Halvorson’s Octet, and with other knotty improvising collectives. But… Read More
We Will Always Love You begins with what sounds like a teen girl in the throes of a breakup. “I will always love you,” she calls out through tears, and the Avalanches pick up her signal and broadcast it through… Read More