Below, you will find my hand-picked top 5 musical albums of 2023. Yves Tumor - Praise a Lord Who Chews but Which Does Not Consume; (Or Simply, Hot Between Worlds) Slowdive - Everything Is Alive Fever Ray - Radical Romantics The Kills - God Games Sufjan Stevens - Javelin Honorable mentions: Health - Rat Wars Black Belt Eagle Scout - The Land, The Water,…
This is one of those albums that comes out of nowhere and then proceeds to melt your soul from the inside. I don't even know exactly how I came about buying this CD in 1998, but after listening to it once, I was hooked. I was definitely exposed to Tricky, Portishead, and trip-hop before 1998, so it wasn't some sort of radical new sound…
This week on the Is This Song Good? podcast, we dig into Depeche Mode's cover of The Stooge's song Dirt. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MF6AAuXnXN4
This week on Is This Song Good?, we have Jack Stauber's Buttercup, a simple and goofy song that embodies the qualities of a cartoon. "Ow! That hurt!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9mHKXR9Opw
Here we are one last time. The final album of the Convocations series. Once again, Sufjan Stevens delivers the soothing sounds of reverberated and delayed synthesizers. The sweet warmth of synth pads and plinky dinky of the arpeggiated melodies. There isn't as much atmospheric tension present in this one as some of the others, but it's a nice bookend to the other pieces. Sometimes…
Here we are again. This time it's the penultimate Convocations album called Celebrations. At times, it reminds a bit of Radiohead's Kid A album. Other times, it sounds like a Brian Eno ambient record. There is a calmness about the smooth synth pads employed. Occasionally, you get some tinky winky sounds with delay like on track V. Back in 2006, Sufjan released a 5-disc…
Git yer pacifiers and X ready, because we're going clubbin'! I first heard Porter Robinson on a Coachella livestream and it was the best sounding DJ/EDM artist I'd heard in awhile. I don't particularly care for this type of music and I recognize that the younger generations are hella into it for some reason. Nurture does not have the bombast of other EDM DJs,…
Annnnnnd we're back! Sufjan's third part of the five-part Convocations album is called Revelations and I'm digging this one a bit more than the last one. It's light and airy. Soothing at times and kind of jarring at others. The 8th track Revelation VIII sounds like something you'd hear in a Poltergeist movie, almost like Sufjan is stuck inside a TV static. I also…
Claudio Sanchez, the lead singer/guitarist for Coheed & Cambria, has a solo side project called The Prize Fighter Inferno. The first Prize Fighter album, My Brother's Blood Machine, came out in 2006 as a kind of acoustic electro, weirdly folk album. It was meant to be kind of a side story to the grandiose sci-fi story being told with Coheed & Cambria's music and…
This is the second installment of the Convocations series. As the name implies, this one is a bit more sad than the previous one, though not a lot sadder. Sometimes it is eerie, like in the track number VI. Mostly, it is more repetitive and less fulfilling than the Meditations volume. I've listened to it 3 full times now and only a couple tracks…
