Reviews by kuvien

Somewhere between fire and spirit, Halvorson’s mind-boggling guitar work weaves among the bright sparks of the strings and the mysterious low hoots and high birdsong of the woodwinds. The end of the world never sounded so good; let these miracle-working jazz artists take you by the hand and lead you into certain heresy.

This is a weird one, because to me it feels like each track is either psych rock or neo-psych, but not both. It’s kind of a see-saw, which has its own charm. The touch of Swedish folk here and there is a nice garnish to my folksy ears, too.

Through spoken-word crafting, Duncan creates several short yet horrifying snapshots of human behavior and (in)human emotion.

This is one of my favorite albums across all genres. It’s nothing but sheer delight, both in its musical energy and technicality but also in its more meta considerations, specifically the fact that this is the only album by this obscure band, and it just happens to be utterly amazing. Only a thousand copies were ever printed, and those copies were sold by the band at their live shows. The music is based on the science fiction classic novel, Dune (which is where I guess the band gets its name). Can you taste the spice? Can you feel the desert winds? Are you thirsty for more? There’s so much expansive mystery encapsulated in this album. Delicious through and through!

This is some weird-ass trippy psychedelic scat singing laid heavily over some infectious grooves that are part 70s lounge part funk. Sometimes her voice sings along with the melody, but just as often it cuts across the music like a saw. Delicious!

This punk sway with its female rebel charm could have stirred something within me, but, alas, my blood is tame.

I shared this one with Bruce. Don't think he's heard it yet.

I usually write just my reaction to an album and try not to go too meta into things, but this time I have to because it’s just so delicious to watch metalhead tears fall when one of their beloved metal bands makes a non-metal album. It’s like they’re not allowed or something, like it’s some kind of betrayal, and it’s just so beautiful to watch all the salty reactions. This one’s not kvlt enough for the diehard fans.

Aptly named band and EP. War crimes? War is a crime! This is blitzkrieg bombs dropping on your face after a barrage has already taken most of your hearing. Fucking miserable!

This is incredibly lonely music. It's like operating heavy mining machinery on a deserted planet where it always rains and it's always night. You've got echo-location devices you have to lower on cold chains into dark caverns. And you're the last miner left. You keep working because it's what you've always done.

This is a very poor-quality, warbly home recording of Drake just sitting there with his guitar singing folk and blues tunes. This tidy, intimate collection of dusty songs is something for lovers of lo-fi rarities. and for Drake fans who can't get enough of their favorite song-poet's soft voice.

This music, like pretty much all of Doyle's releases, is tied up in the experience of the film. As a Shakespeare nut, I adore the collaboration of Doyle and Branagh. There's so much pathos here, highlighting such poignant scenes as Hamlet's letter to Ophelia or the moment Hamlet realizes Ophelia has tricked him.

I wonder how many holes came out to catch this show. Does such highly artistic and esoteric work as this resonate with a hole? Can a hole grasp the moment of this kind of music?

It is no coincidence that this album has exactly 12 tracks, as it follows the hours, the months, and the seasons in an homage to and revival of pre-Christian mythology and magic permeating sowing and harvest, when the darkened human mind worshiped stars and planets as if they were gods, bending to their inscrutable, capricious influences. Look at the album cover for a moment: it's a sunclock. And the sun, our greatest celestial deity, is looking at you.

Such wonderful moments of bright horn melody bursting forth from the avant-garde landscape, and the vibraphone just holding together the cool, relaxed atmosphere. Everything about this album sounds effortless and un-reproducible. Hubbard's trumpet and Dolphy's flute playing off each other is probably my favorite part. So much chemistry, again coming back to the playful, charming vibraphone--an invitation to and a springboard for the other players to blow. As Dolphy himself says in the liner notes, everyone holds the line, and once the space is created, especially by Williams' "pulse" drumming, freedom follows.

But reading the liner notes just guts me. At the end, Dolphy says he's off to Europe to play his own music and not be put down like he was in the States for doing his own thing. Said he'd be more appreciated over there in Europe. That's where the liner notes end. On a high point of hope. Four months later he died from undiagnosed diabetes!

Five compositions, three of which are Dolphy's, and oh man, you can tell the difference! You really feel what a master this jazz artist is: knowing just when to slacken the reins, when to tighten them, to let the chaos careen without crashing.

What a shithead singing about WW3 and his old man being a bum! Pretty much unassailable.

Let me briefly retell the old Breton folk tale of the White Doe. Marguerite, a young woman, has a secret, a secret that keeps her angry all the time. An anger she can express only to her mother as they walk in the woods in the daytime. The mother sings, but young Marguerite sighs and finally confesses to her mother that she turns into a white doe every night and runs wild through the forest. And she needs help from her mother, because the hunters pursue her, and one night she is sure they will catch up to her and kill her. The most fierce of these hunters is her brother, and one night, he does catch up to her and kill her, though he does not know the white doe is his sister. After her death, she is slaughtered and fed to the family at a feast, praising the heroism of the brother. This is what I learned sitting (and interpreted), hugging my knees to my chest, in the middle of a mysterious, crumbling church as Sophia Djebel Rose crafted a whole witch religion out of her music and her wails.

This is nowhere near as wild as her next album, but it's still a damn great debut from a fearless vocalist, still very much in my wheelhouse of freaky foreign female folk. First of all, the album title: it's referring to the transmigration of the soul, or, in a simpler term, reincarnation. This music, straight from the high heart of Auvergne, is a meditation upon the artist's connection to all that lives, especially in the natural world away from cities, far from artifice. So let's go back to the album title: she's taking it a step further. It's not just souls migrating from human to human but rather to and from the flora and fauna of the world.

Show me a villain who hath called Japan "the land of the rising sun", and I am sent to be revenged upon him. Either they got Js to self-parody their tribal tones, or these frogs are ever-so slightly racist. Either way, I approve.