Reviews by kuvien

A delightful, beautiful blend of dream pop and post-rock, this album never fails to transport me to faerie. To steal someone else's analogy of this band, this album is more selkie than troll. She swims through this music. This is a pleasant day at the festival where you browse the stalls and eat lunch upon the warm grass. The music unfolds all around you, revealing whatever vistas your imagination can conjure. Music so fragile it will break if you but brush against it, music so robust it will sweep you away in a tempest.

I listened to this when it was first released, and having lost one of its members, the band sounds a bit different on this album. My initial reaction was one of guarded skepticism. I wasn't sure if I liked it, but when I listened to it again, it just happened to be when I was pulling an all-nighter (and no I wasn't studying). I danced to this album harder than I've ever danced in my life outside a live show setting, and the dancing helped me understand and love this album.

This lacks their earlier fire and creativity. It's still good, but it's not amazing. They're basically taking the Sufjan route now: making decent music but nothing to write home about. They've got an amazing catalog and are now just coasting on inertia, just paying the bills.

All the calm, soothing parts of Sigur Rós' shtick is on this ethereal, untitled album. Very entr'acte. The arras never rises. There are actually a couple moments where the organ-driven music sounds like something Pink Floyd would have made. But the moments quickly evaporate. For the most part, this album is mood crafting.

Well, I mean, I guess those donks aren't going to slob themselves.

A subdued, introspective pop album full of lush melodies, acoustic guitars, strings, and even those lazy-sounding indie horns.

I'm not as much a fan of her other albums, but Sia absolutely nails electropop at its best on this album. Every song is amazing and fun, and I love the sarcastic bite in some of the tracks, especially when she demonstrates the fatigue modern people have with "too much of a good thing". Fuck it. That's when you smile through the pain.

Some parts technical, some parts funky. Some parts full-on, some parts subdued. A pretty cool and engaging out-of-the-way prog album.

Despite being a prog rock album, this document starts off with synths that strike me as both futuristic and haunting in atmosphere. The epic first track is telling a story, and though I don't know the particulars, it's clearly an exciting adventure--some instrumental tracks possess such a strong narrative quality that it's impossible not to pick up on the thread. Side B sets a different tone, starting off with erratic percussion, evoking just a hint of an insectoid feel, perhaps still keeping with the futuristic feel of the synths. The music as it progresses stabilizes into a standard prog rock groove and returns to electronica-like synths at the album's end.

A strong, deep album with obvious themes of death and its connection to life. Just look at the cover: a zombie knight-errant rescuing a fair damsel in distress, though I think perhaps her rescuing has distressed her more than any ogre or dragon could.

So many late-night memories of this one, dancing in private and just getting lost in the music. Posford knows how to craft a perfect scene with his music, to keep the party going but not let things get obnoxious. “Some laugh, some weep, some dance for joy.” Some do all three.

This is their best album, a pulsing, rhythmic, psychedelic tour through the possibilities of psybient. This is a warm hug of joy on a cold night. Yeah, listen to this only at night.

Posford keeps the same basic sound of one long chill party, but he's made enough tweaks to keep it interesting. Various subspecies of electric monkey mailmen climb fluorescent trees to deliver eggs to nests so that we can know what it is to be birds this time around. Except we still have our mammalian hearts--can't escape them! Nothing comes from nothing.

A haunting split EP that kicks off with a powerful lament of a wife who wishes her cowardly husband was dead. The members of Shovel Dance Collective make it known that their purpose here is to "uncover proto-feminist narratives and queer histories", which means giving a voice to the voiceless throughout folk history. Look. I get it. You're trying to be relevant, trying to sell records, but come on, guys. I've been listening to folk for years now, and any folkhead worth his salt knows that there is plenty of feminist and queer representation in folk music. No one silenced or is silencing those voices. You just need to, ya know, listen to more folk. The fiancé of the princess, a man so beautiful that her father, the king, wants to bed him? The woman wishing she was a single girl because marriage binds, impoverishes, and neglects women? Yeah, it's all right there, and those are just a couple of examples off the top of my head.

The other side of this six-track split is led by English guitarist C Joynes who takes a "magpie approach" to fingerpicking, which means he doesn't cling to stylistic dogma that says the guitar must be played a certain way and not another. He instead collects various approaches, eclectic in his understanding of what the instrument is capable of when allowed to express other idioms and techniques.

Imagine the waterways of the world, great and small. Where they go, from the packed urban regions crowding their shores to the uninhabited wild banks. Where water goes, people go. And where people go, music follows.

I guess their hearts are in the right place? They're trying to "decolonize folk", to focus more on the fringes, the oppressed, the less-than-mainstream identities, but... and I've written this in response to another album somewhere with a similar ethos: listen to more folk, y'all, because the songs of the queer and the championing of the oppressed have for centuries been celebrated right there alongside the patriarchal and nationalist tunes. I am impressed, however, with how the collective sees itself as leaderless, thus performing on stage in a physical arrangement that does not identify any individual musician as the leader. In a way, it's a kind of musical version of King Arthur's Round Table. Here we are all equal, our voices all of equal significance and weight.

This live set is cool. Beginning to end. Cool, sexy, smooth, confident, creative, bold, fun. Spalding's singing just slays me. Also, I love how they do a Nascimento number in the middle of the show.

I hate the album cover (nothing to do with the music, of course!). I just wanna say, “Run away, dude. She’s got crazy in her eyes.” Whatever. The music is smooth but not too smooth, just the hint of a bite here and there in the tenor sax. But mostly driving without bumps, like those old Lincolns that just kind of glide over imperfections in the road, like when it speeds along but feels like it’s standing still. A wonderful feeling, slo-mo as if I’ve had a strong drink...but I’ve not been drinking. Herbie Hancock on piano is a nice treat for me.

Pretty damn good tenor sax player and composer. Really smooth, but not so smooth as to put you to sleep. Smooth with spice. This one’s got McCoy Tyner sitting at the piano, and his bits are as fine as can be. You can hardly hear the bass, though, which perhaps was a stylistic choice. Looks like Shorter wanted to keep his apprenticeship to Coltrane on the dl, so he didn’t mention it in the liner notes. Well, the influence is obvious anyway.

Yeah, keep that chute narrow, lover!