New Music (3.31.2015)

Sufjan Stevens
Carrie & Lowell

In a career spanning well-over a decade, Sufjan Stevens has proven himself to be a master of storytelling. He is able to create time and place using only song in a way unparalleled by any other current musician of any genre.

The American mythology he retells--or even generates--on the majestic orchestra pieces Michigan and Illinois is something akin to reading Whitman or Emerson. Even the folksy-Christian Seven Swans was able to transport you to biblical places, and The Age of Adz painted pictures with electronics so gracefully, the techno love story contained within seemed to unfold directly in front of you.

Carrie & Lowell is not a mythos, nor is it a story. Not in Steven's typical, fictional sense anyhow. This is the heartbreaking true-life drama that is Steven's relationship with his mother, a woman plagued by mental illness and substance abuse that followed her--and in effect, Stevens himself--to her death in 2012. But never before has such a gut-wrenching tale been told so beautifully.

Stevens has taken something so deeply personal, and made it into a tapestry of awe. It is, by a wide margin, his most minimal album, with most songs containing only a plucked guitar and Steven's barely-whispered vocals. It is also his most affecting, with each syllable sounding as if from a trauma ward, each note played like it is the last she would hear. You can hear with each phrase how Stevens is devastated by the loss of Carrie, despite having only spent only a few days with her over the course of his 40 years.

But do not take from this that Carrie & Lowell is nothing but a depressing affair. This album is more than a dirge, but the second-line spiritual as well. Yes, Stevens dwells on his mother's death, and often contemplates how he can raise her, but just as frequently he celebrates the little time they were together.

Carrie & Lowell is produced gorgeously, with each minimalist song given the feeling of a vast space, fathomless in it's overwhelming starkness. But more than anything, Stevens has now provided us with the code-key to unlocking all those cryptic and vague lyrics from past works, like Michigan's "Romulus" or Illinois' "The Seer's Tower." This is a work of extreme genius and infinite appeal, granting invaluable comfort and indispensable humanity to those who would hear it.

New Music (3.24.2015)

Lightning Bolt
Fantasy Empire

Every once in a great while, an album is released that challenges the industry's definition of "loud." Minstry's The Land of Rape and Honey, My Bloody Valentine's Loveless, Sleigh Bells' Treats, All have laid claim to "loudest record" but, inevitably, another will rise and take it's place. Lightning Bolt's Fantasy Empire is meant to be played on speakers, not headphones, with the knob all the way up and the needle firmly in the red. If your neighbors or fellow drivers can't hear the pounding drums or fuzzed-out guitars, it's not loud enough yet.

Certainly, it helps that the songwriting is both catchy and original, making no part of the album a retread; but the muffled, indiscernible vocals, and the driving, propellant rhythms turn what could be a tired, hazy rehashing of No Age into a forced death-march. Longer songs are made all the more compelling by the insane talent of both musicians: drums that never seem to slow down and a bass guitar played more ferociously than humanly possible.

If you want sonic diversity, if you need a wall of noise, if you feel as though you will not have lived your life to the fullest without blowing an eardrum, I have two words for you: Lightning Bolt. A million times, Lightning Bolt.

New Music (3.17.2015)

Kendrick Lamar
To Pimp a Butterfly

To say that Kendrick Lamar's second major-label, non-mixtape release was highly anticipated would be to say that Mary Magdalene was only passively waiting for the third day. And while To Pimp a Butterfly is well worth the wait, it is not what any of us expected. Heavily influenced by 60's and 70's funk and soul, Kendrick's sophomore effort is dense and often feels ungainly. But the more work you put in listening to it, the more amazing aural benefits you receive.

The backing tracks could be songs on their own; the samples used and the beats constructed are so mesmerizing they outshine everything else coming out of the West Coast scene. When you add Kendrick's innovative rhyming style and deeply personal lyrics, you come to a juxtaposition that, while jarring, is powerfully enticing.

Though you can hear the obvious influences of Outkast (many of the rhyming schemes borrow from Aquemini) and Kanye West (who else puts that many soul records and string instruments in their samples?), To Pimp a Butterfly is a sound entirely its own. Many will dismiss it on first listen as a self-indulgent, overly-complex, art record, but anyone willing to put in the time will be justly rewarded. Icarus may not have reached the Sun, but he did soar.

New Music (3.11.2015)

Yowler
The Offer

If Sufjan Stevens only wrote songs about the ocean and the one major threat it presents, he would be Yowler. However, Yowler is actually the moniker of one Maryn Jones, the brilliant mind behind this guitar-and-voice-only performance piece about the strange and terrifying dichotomy that is water's ability to both give life and take it away. How the rolling waves can bring both peace and brutal force. How ice is both pure and a hazard. If a frozen lake can be your grave while teaming with nautical life, is being trapped underneath a death sentence, or a rebirth? Earth's most precious gift--a compound with unexplained properties--is the main reason we exist, and The Offer is an essay on its symbolism, what it means to us as living things, as well as the beauty and crushing loss that is the human experience. Water is both birth and death, violence and calm, gift and burden, and The Offer is both lamentation and exultation.

New Music (3.04.2015)

Sannhet
Revisionist

Usually, I'm not one for instrumental acts that aren't purely electronica, but every once in a great while, a band will emerge that makes me revise my outlook. Explosions in the Sky was such a band, with compositions that were entirely compelling and never boring. Sannhet, I'm glad to say, is another. In a two-week period of musical doldrums, Sannhet's Revisionist is a bright spot against the never-ending cycle of snow and ice that is the Northeast this time of year. The thing that makes Revisionist great isn't just the brilliant drums, or the ethereal guitar work, it's that every song is structured so that it could have lyrics--like a paint-by-numbers for metal squall. But even with words completely absent, Sannhet's second album manages to be more lyrical than opera, and more expressive than an aria.