This collection of folksy post-rock is something of a paint-by-numbers affair, but well-crafted and engaging enough as a background soundtrack that its more obvious faults can be overlooked. All Is Wild, All Is Silent isn’t a terrible album, but it does put one mind of a distillation of ideas rather than something more fresh. Much [...]
Entries from May 2009
May 22, 2009
Bonnie Prince Billy – Live @ The Apollo, May 21, 2009
The highlight of this evening was a deeply intimate version of “Blood Embrace” for which Matt Sweeney came out to play some guitar and sing a bit. Mr. Oldham paced, gestured, scowled and delivered in full a deeply moving performance, looking like a cross between a street preacher touched by the hand of god and [...]
May 21, 2009
People Really Seem To Hate The Dickens Out Of Wavves
Having no investment in the lo-fi noisey pop thing I can’t tell you where the authentic stuff begins and inauthentic stuff ends. Authenticity is a great game for idiots to play but those of us outside of the kiddie pool have a completely different set of needs. Out of the pile of stuff I’ve heard, [...]
May 18, 2009
Squarepusher – Numbers Lucent
Whether intended to be a cute reimagining of the mid-90s intersection of acid and jungle or merely a nostalgia trip, Numbers Lucent is unfortunately another documentation of how the mighty have fallen into less-mighty ways. For all of the bright coloring (the cover art is amazing) in many ways this is merely a retread of [...]
May 15, 2009
Coil – Black Antlers
“I will be all right if you hold me” repeats Jhon Balance in “Sex With Sun Ra”. One dead man singing about another dead man.
While not quite the eerie moment of “Tattooed Man” on The Ape of Naples, it is genuinely difficult for a fan to separate the intended and accidental inferences and references from [...]
May 14, 2009
A Completely Convenient Truth
Otherwise, is there anything more embarrassing than a pack of liberal blogger types sharing microbrews and enthusing over The Decembrists, the single worst musical group in all history, the nadir of human aesthetic achievement, the final proof that human cognition as we know it, which originated song before speech, will end thusly, whistling grisly half-melodies [...]
May 14, 2009
Agoraphobic Nosebleed – Agorapocalypse
You can (legitimately) listen to the whole album at the appropriately-named agorapocalypse.com.
I think something is lost in their transition from absurdist drum machine HATEHATEHATE to a more band-like experience, particularly the expansion out to two and three minute long tracks. The drum programming is more like a drummer and less like an angry smear; it’s [...]
May 8, 2009
Charles Atlas – To The Dust: From Man You Came And To Man You Shall Return
Though I am indeed big into The Orb – I’ll be at the Friday show in July at the Music Hall of Williamsburg – the genre “chill out” is generally just fucking terrible. The name is an awful anachronism – though it was once a utilitarian description, a serene contrast for weary riders as the [...]
May 7, 2009
Fire on Fire – The Orchard
Some of the more interesting current music fads include MBV reconfigurations, usually with several ladies in the mix; the emergence of “hipster metal”; and lo-fi quirk-rock, of which there has been a steady underground that is righteously pissed at the success of johnny-fuzz-lately types like Wavves.
Sour fuzzy grapes aside, the cultural current that interests me [...]
