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dustedmagazine · 5 years ago

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Dust Volume 6, Number 1

A new year means new music. At least eventually, it does, though January is notoriously slow for album releases. Meanwhile, there’s plenty we missed from late (and mid and even early) 2019, so let’s dig into that for one last big Dust. Here we cover subcontinental LGBTQ gangsta rap, industrial clangor, string quartets, Welsh agitpunk, electronics, free jazz, blackened death metal and an odd, charming collaboration between Cate Le Bon and Bradford Cox (see photo). Writers include Bill Meyer, Jennifer Kelly, Ian Mathers, Tobias Carroll, Andrew Forell, Ray Garraty, Jason Gioncontere, Ethan Militsky and Jonathan Shaw.

Jeb Bishop / Alex Ward / Weasel Walter — Flayed (Ugexplode)

Flayed by Jeb Bishop / Alex Ward / Weasel Walter

You know a party is good if it carries on even though the organizer can’t show up. Bassist Damon Smith planned this encounter, which involved his long-term partner in intensity and chaos, drummer Weasel Walter; New England improvisational fellow traveler (at least until Smith moved to St. Louis a few months after this March, 2019 session) Jeb Bishop on trombone and electronics; and Alex Ward, a veteran of work with Derek Bailey and This Is Not This Heat, on guitar and clarinet. Since Walter has played with both of the other guys in and outside of the Flying Luttenbachers, when Smith had to drop out for scheduling reasons, he was confident that the trio could make something of both the opportunity to play and the space made available by the absent bass. He was right. Both the title and prevailing assumptions about Walter might set you up to expect a one-dimensional blowout, but there’s loads of listening and thoughtful, instant reacting taking place on each of the album’s eight, mostly pithy tracks. This music plays out like a combination of jujitsu and shuttle diplomacy, with players shifting between support and challenge, density and space, rapidity and reserve from second to second.

Bill Meyer

Cartel Madras — Age of the Goonda (Sub Pop)

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Cartel Madras turns gangsta rap’s hyper-male, African-American-oriented bravado on its side, filtering the guns and blunts ethos through a female, queer, multicultural lens without diluting its violence in the least. Sisters Priya and Bhagya Ramesh, known as Contra and Eboshi, have lived in Calgary since childhood, but they immigrated from Chennai, India, once part of Madras, hence the name, hence the tricky scales and intricate, not-quite-Western rhythms of their rhymes. Age of the Goonda works in a spare, menacing way, dense, referential wordplay atop an undulating threat of sub-bass and the occasional spray of bullets.

“Goonda Gold,” celebrates cartoonish dominance, though with a South Asian twist. Little bits of Hindi harmonics decorate the bare architecture of synth bass sounds and cracking, stabbing percussion (augmented here by gunfire); the Cartel’s chant of “Gold on my neck I’m a Goonda/got guns in the air like a junta” puts a subcontinental spin on ghetto law. The clever-est word sprays come in “The Legend of Jalopeno Boiz,” where the duo references everything from Frost/Nixon to incel stereotypes, but the single “Lil Pump Type Beat,” is all hedonism, devious syncopation and sexual predation. Though wildly intersectional, these tracks make no concessions to soft, liberal ideas about how women/minorities/LGBTQ people wield power; they do it just like the men do, with guns. “Take off your top boy/somebody bring me my gun/that bag in the back of the jeep/you just a bitch on the run,” asserts one or the other sister in “Jumpscare.” What was that you were saying about women and nurture?

Jennifer Kelly

CIA Debutante — The Landlord (Siltbreeze)

CIA Debutante-The Landlord by CIA Debutante

A new Siltbreeze record is a rare blessing nowadays. The label’s first release since 2018 comes from Paris duo CIA Debutante. The Landlord fits in nicely with the label’s storied '90s output, particularly the Shadow Ring. The electronics aren’t quite glitchy—they sound more like the batteries in a cheap toy dying. Still, CIA Debutante are savvy enough to avoid getting too clever with their sputtering, plodding, and whizzing, and they don’t go the easy route when layering incongruous sounds. There’s never the fatiguing sense that they rely on the same few tricks. It helps that their murky, paranoid vignettes are fully engrossing. CIA Debutante tap into something truly nightmarish on The Landlord, which is a rare accomplishment. Sure, plenty of music shoots for tense and creepy, but CIA Debutante have an exceptional gift for the uncanny, the kind of stuff that haunts you long after you’ve woken up and can no longer hope to grasp it. Ethan Milititsky

Decoherence — Ekpyrosis (Sentient Ruin Laboratories)

Ekpyrosis by Decoherence

Decoherence is a pretty good name for a band that locates itself in the liminal space between industrial music’s stomp and clangor and black metal’s astringent tumult. The band’s new LP (and first full length release) Ekpyrosis is at its best when its waves of distorted hiss, dissonant riffing and distant shrieks and growls threaten to rend the record to shreds. One imagines that if you found yourself in an aluminum ladder factory, amid the massive drills and extruding machines and metal presses and then removed your ear protectors, you’d hear something akin to this — especially if the place was possessed by demons of ill intent. It’s a well-crafted, ritualized chaos. The band is so insistent on a specific set of sounds and forms that the record’s long tracks tend to blur into one another. Which may be the point. Decoherence, indeed.

Jonathan Shaw

Bertrand Denzler / CoÔ — Arc (Potlatch)

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Arc is a two-part, album-length work by Bertrand Denzler, a Swiss-born, Paris-based saxophonist and composer. It is performed by CoÔ, a string septet led by double bassist Félicie Bazelaire. The ensemble’s composition is a sort of funhouse reflection of a string quartet, distorted towards breadth; it comprises one violin, two violas, one cello and three double basses. But there’s nothing comic about this music, which is quite beautiful in the same way as a slow winter sunset. Denzler’s method here involves the use of continuous sounds, but don’t call it drone. The players use both conventional and extended techniques to create a continually changing sequence of striated sounds. Naked scrapes and cavernous groans arc in formation, changing fairly frequently over the course of each piece. The result is immersive enough to let you get lost, but keep your ears and eyes open; you wouldn’t want to miss one moment of gradual transition. A note about circumstances — Potlatch, the label that released this CD, has slowed its production in recent years, and this is the only record it released in 2018. Apparently, the label isn’t wasting its time with unnecessary effort; Arc clears the necessity bar.

Bill Meyer

Fujiya & Miyagi — Flashback (Impossible Objects of Desire)

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One of the interesting things about Fujiya & Miyagi’s songwriting is that as the UK post-motorik outfit’s music becomes ever more focused and sleekly propulsive, frontman David Best has zeroed in on any number of little aspects of life disturb and upset the kind of cool pulse the band specializes in. Here it’s everything from violations of your “Personal Space,” the “Fear of Missing Out,” and nagging thoughts in the title track to the more political concerns of the closing lengthy workout of “Gammon” (which eventually, in one of the little touches that makes F&M’s music so addictive, settles on the “pure evil vibrating” of a dial-up modem). That doesn’t mean the band can no longer bust a groove just for the pure joy of it, as “Dying Swan Act” proves, but it’s the combination of those chops and the perceptive if increasingly jaundiced eye they turn on life that makes them such a unique and compelling act.

Ian Mathers

Cate Le Bon & Bradford Cox — Myths 400 (Mexican Summer)

Myths 004 by Cate Le Bon & Bradford Cox

Intricate fancies turn just out of true in this pop-up collaboration between Cate Le Bon and Deerhunter’s Bradford Cox, the fourth in a series of joint EPs recorded under the auspices of Mexican Summer’s annual Marfa Myths festival (hence Myths 400). The two artists work in a skewed, peripheral vision take on artful pop, building interlocking boxes of percussion and whimsey in which fleeting glimpses of loveliness flit by. The song-i-est bit of Myths 400 is undoubtedly “Secretary,” a Weimar-decadent bit of mournful song hedged in clanks and clicks, strings and clarinets, and the odd combination of Le Bon’s pure art-song shiver and Cox’s less pristine, more grounded voice. Yet the rhythm-centered oddities are just as rewarding; resist the slap-bang fanciful-ness of growly-voiced, Cox-led “Fireman,” with Le Bon trilling off center arias in the margins at your own peril. “What Is She Wearing” bangs out disconsonant guitar tones in slightly off center patterns and tunings; it’s a wind-up toy’s existential crisis. Le Bon chants in a Middle European cadence, as the cut falls somewhere between early Michachu and a Kurt Weil song. It’s about the last thing you’d expect to emerge from the desert, eccentric, abstracted, playful and utterly urbane.

Jennifer Kelly

Urs Leimgruber / Andreas Willers / Alvin Curran / Fabrizio Sperra—Rome-ing (Leo)

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Urs Leimgruber has covered a lot of musical ground in a performing and recording career that spans over 45 years. The three musicians who join the Swiss saxophonist on this freely improvised encounter, which was recorded in Rome late in 2018, are well chosen to access aspects of that history and shape it into sound configurations that are quite present-focused. Quick, light-fingered, and restless, drummer Fabrizio Sperra keeps things in constant motion. Swiss guitarist Andreas Willers stirs chunks of almost rock-ish noise and sprinkles stinging, pure-toned notes into the mix that give the music heft without slowing it down. Alvin Curran, an American keyboardist and composer (and member of MEV), draws on classical more than jazz elements in his piano playing; there are moments where he stubbornly erects a structure that the other musicians must either inhabit or work around. But his sampler also enables him to inject the sounds of other places. Shifting between tenor and saxophones, Leimgruber drives quickly spiraling phrases through the open spaces and uses astringent, distressed tone-shards to suggest where there needs to be more space.

Bill Meyer

The Master Musicians of Dyffryn Moor — Music for the National Health Service (Amgueddfa Llwch)

Music for the National Health Service by The Master Musicians of Dyffryn Moor

When I was a younger punk, I would sometimes take in the phenomenon of bands’ whose lyrical explanations would take longer to deliver than the playing of the actual songs. And while I haven’t seen this crop up much recently, I feel like that aesthetic is alive and well when I visit the Bandcamp page of The Master Musicians of Dyffryn Moor, which includes a terse essay about the dangers facing the NHS under the current British government. This new EP follows two excellent full-lengths, Cerddoriaeth Ddefodol Gogledd Sir Benfro (Ritual Music of North Pembrokeshire) and Contemporary Protest Music, which blend the “instrumental music can be politically charged” feel of Godspeed You! Black Emperor with the intricacy of Steve Reich’s Drumming. These two songs continue in that tradition — furiously played percussion with a heated political subtext — but add a few tweaks to the sound the group has already established. Specifically, there’s a stronger electronic element here: you could probably get a dancefloor moving if you cued up “A spell to protect the NHS from those who seek to destroy it.” Its opposite number, “A hex on those who seek to destroy the NHS,” is built around a steady pulse. You probably can’t dance as well to that, but given the potential psychic damage incurred by dancing to a hex, would you actually want to?

Tobias Carroll

Overground Collective — Super Mario (Babel Label)

SUPER MARIO by OverGround Collective

The Overground Collective is a pan-European big band that is based in London and led by Paulo Duarte, a Portuguese guitarist/composer currently based in Scandinavia. If that sounds like a bit to get your head around, you probably need only wait a while to see what Boris’s Britain does to the freedoms of movement and thought necessary for such an endeavor to get off the ground. For the rest of us, it’s a nice illustration of why such fluidity is part of a better way. Duarte spent some time in England studying the ways of various improvisers, and recruited 17 to join him in realizing a set of compositions designed expressly for them. Certain of the participants come from free jazz (Julie Kjaer, Rachel Musson) or cross-genre experimentation (Yazz Ahmed), and you can hear the influence of such approaches in a few moments of freefall and adventurously conceived solos. But these elements fit into a structure that fits squarely in the tradition. Duarte sets tunes you could hum on grooves that’ll make you tap your feet, albeit quickly enough to annoy your neighbor if the floorboards happen to transmit your amateur approximation of his beats, and dresses them up in arrangements that could speak to a person who thinks that jazz’s lineage is a straight line from Duke Ellington to Maria Schneider. Music like this is a reproach to those who think that differences can’t be complimentary parts of a whole.

Bill Meyer

Pictish Trail — Thumb World (Fire)

Thumb World by Pictish Trail

Folktronica from the tiny island of Eigg in the Hebrides, this latest album by Pictish Trail (Johnny Lynch) demonstrates the aesthetic value of both isolation and connection. Per isolation: Lynch lives on a windblown island with fewer than 100 other people. But as for connection, he is intimately involved in a northerly folk scene through King Creosote’s Fence Records and surrounded by local musicians. There aren’t that many folks on Eigg, but almost everybody plays an instrument. That kind of environment allows space for eccentricity and practice, which shows up on these expansive, dance-inflected, folk-shadowed cuts. Pictish Trail enlarges his subtle, personal songs with enveloping arrangements of rock sounds and club electronics; Kim Moore contributes some string arrangements and Alex Thomas of Squarepusher sits in on drums. “Double Sided” has the lilt and ramble of Three EPs Beta Band (Lynch has been out touring with Steve Mason lately), while gorgeous, glistening “Slow Memories” has the glitch, glow and aura of early Tunng. Thumb World demonstrates that music can be solitary without being lonely, introspective without self-absorbation. “You’re my solitude/I’m never so alone by myself,” sings Lynch, on the surprisingly rock-guitared “Bad Algebra,” underlining the fact that too many people (or the wrong people) can be isolating, and a few can provide the space for originality and experiment.

Jennifer Kelly

Pinkish Black — Concept Unification (Relapse)

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Texas psych sludge prog metal duo Pinkish Black has been quiet for a little while; their last record, 2015’s Bottom of the Morning, was such a compact and potent summation of the miasmic bad vibes that Daron Beck (synthesizers, voice) and Jon Teague (drums) can summon up seemingly at will. No more than a minute into the opening title track of their fourth record you get a strong reminder of just that atmosphere; you might as well be in a haunted castle during the full moon. The closing, lengthy “Next Solution” also offers a reminder of what you might call classic Pinkish Black, but it’s the four songs in between that show Beck and Teague working to make sure there is always room to expand their dark palette. Whether it’s the relatively straightforward, thrashy “Until” or the prettily drifting “Inanimatronic” the results are always interesting. Bottom of the Morning remains the best introduction for now to this duo’s indelible sound, but once you’re a fan Concept Unification makes for a strong and promising follow-up.

Ian Mathers

Alexa Rose—Medicine for Living (Big Legal Mess)

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“How I wish I were kinder, how I wish I were patient, I could learn all the songs on the gospel station,” trills Alexa Rose in a water pure soprano touched with shivery vibrato as she navigates the twists and corners of the title track from her lovely debut album. The Virginia-born, Memphis-based songwriter has a native’s familiarity with gospel, country and folk blues, but a fresh, sparkling delivery that makes these well-worn forms sound like she just thought of them. A lilting, effortless voice elicits spare melancholy sparked with hope and a crack band of Americana pros in tow – Will Sexton on guitar, George Sluppick playing drums and Mark Edgard Stuart on bass — fill out the songs without a bit of bloat. “Tried and True” enlists a cajun squeeze box and skittering banjo into Rose’s smart, unsentimental songcraft; country teems with strong women disappointed by love, but Alexa Rose is clear-eyed and strong enough to kick its ass without breaking meter. Gorgeous and empowered stuff.

Jennifer Kelly

Sartegos — O Sangue da Noite (I, Voidhanger)

O Sangue da Noite by SARTEGOS

This new release by Sartegos isn’t so much blackened death metal as it is a death metal record that morphs its shape and sound into black metal. The buzzy crunch and acrobatic soloing of opener “Sangue e Noite” gradually give way to leaner, meaner riffs, and by the midpoint of fourth track “Solpor dos Mistérios,” the record has fully taken on the properties of merciless, muscular continental black metal. The record may engage with various metal subgenres, but O Sangue da Noite is held together by Sartegos’s focus on Galician nationalist themes and celebrations of its landscape. The band is named for a miniscule rural hamlet in Galicia, and we are told that all lyrics are delivered in the region’s native dialect. Black metal and ardent nationalism don’t always make for the happiest of combinations. For those of us lacking fluency in the language, it’s tough to know what ideological charge the lyrics carry. And Galician regional politics feature a panoply of leftist and right wing factions, all with their own fiery arguments for the region’s autonomy. What sort of blood? Who sings in the night? Hard to say. But the music’s pretty good.

Jonathan Shaw

Seablite – Grass Stains and Novocaine (Emotional Response)

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Bay Area quartet Seablite’s debut album navigates the fuzzy end of indie pop with aplomb. Vocalists Lauren Matsui (guitar) and Galine Tumasyan (bass) are joined by drummer Andy Pastalaniec and ex-Wax Idol Jen Mundy on lead guitar for 11 tracks of chipper, summery shoegaze that sit easily alongside their most obvious influences Lush, Curve and Stereolab. Seablite’s songs are elevated by the interplay of twin vocals, clean guitar lines and bouncy bass lines supported by cymbal heavy motorik drums. There’s steel beneath the gauze as Mundy brings a little of the Idols’ shade to proceedings and Pastalaniec drives songs like “Pillbox” and “Polygraph” hard and fast down a euphoric freeway of top-down thrumming thrills. Yes, it sounds like a lot of bands you’ve heard and maybe loved but Grass Stains and Novocaine is so well put together and convincingly played it’s hard to resist.

Andrew Forell

Seiðr — Intethedens Afsky (Nattetale)

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Seiðr is a one-man band from Denmark. For just one man, he was awfully busy in the past year, having put out three records. Intethedens Afsky can boast of 10 tracks of dirty, primitive sound with bursts of melody buried immediately under a wall of noise. The inspiration for Seiðr’s music can be found in early 1990s Norwegian black metal, and Claus H. (that’s his name) cannot be blamed for being too much of a good student. Why shouldn’t he have learnt from his elders? The first two tracks here have samples from “nature,” and this gives us a hint to how Seiðr’s music can be interpreted: it’s ruptures in Nature’s hellish landscape. No one will be saved.

Ray Garraty

Spider Bags — A Celebration of Hunger (Sophomore Lounge)

SPIDER BAGS "A Celebration of Hunger" by Spider Bags

Spider Bags are still around, making a record every three or four years for Merge. But listening to this debut, it’s hard to imagine how they did it. If subject matter reflects life style, then the motto of these guys back in 2008 was, “We do the hard stuff so there won’t be any left for you. Say, can you loan me a couple of twenties?” But there’s a self-observing intelligence at work in these songs that suggests that self-awareness wasn’t totally obliterated, and a loose, rumbling energy to these roots-tinged garage-rock songs that confirms that the Bags spent at least part of everyday upright. Add to that engineer Brian Paulson’s knack for getting sound under challenging circumstances, which renders the live-sounding performances with sufficient but not distracting clarity, and you have a good soundtrack for the next time you want to drink yourself off the barstool in the privacy of your own home.

Bill Meyer

Luke Spook — Small Town (Third Eye Stimuli)

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Australian multi-instrumentalist Luke Spook steps away from the garage-punk of his Pinheads to conjure up lysergic specters from bygone times on Small Town. There are a fair number of freaked out boil-overs in the offing but the general tone is one of reserved simplicity. Whether sipping tea with the subject of “The Owl” or gathering around the fire with some fellow townsfolk on the title track, Luke channels Syd Barrett to the point of becoming nearly indistinguishable. But what makes Small Town more than just a covers album is Luke’s ability to vary the intimacy of his arrangements when needed. “All the King’s Horses” features a harmonica solo backed up with an (accidental?) chorus of distant, wailing hounds. Those types of moments lurk beneath the surface and inject a pastoral quality that feels authentic. More quirky utopian village than small town, the world Spook creates is a place to live rather than to pass through.

Jason Gioncontere

Nick Storring — Qualms (Never Anything)

Qualms by Nick Storring

Nick Storring’s latest recording started life as the score for a dance performance, and it is easy to imagine how it might function in that role. The composition, which spans both sides of a cassette, is episodic. Each moment feels unique unto itself, creating an environment in which things — maybe movements, or maybe something in your own imagination — have the space to happen. If you caught him onstage with the group Picastro, you would probably see Storring play cello, but for Qualms he plays a couple dozen keyboard, stringed, percussive and woodwind instruments. This allows similar themes and actions to appear and reappear in different garb. One stalking theme, for example, manifests once as a psychedelically dense string melody, and again played by gamelan percussion. Elsewhere passages of meter-less sound temporarily halt the progress. Moments of Steve Reich-like repetition surface, but instead of locking in like they might in a Reich piece, they quickly morph into something else. The same pattern of change that probably made this a handy program for a dance performance makes it an engaging pure listening experience.

Bill Meyer

Sun City Girls — Dawn of the Devi (Abduction)

Dawn of the Devi by Sun City Girls

Dawn of the Devi holds an important place in the Sun City Girls’ discography. Released in 1991, it was the follow up to the much-celebrated Torch of the Mystics, which remains one of the more tuneful and easily-relatable records that Charles Gocher and brothers Alan and Richard Bishop ever did. As such, it had a job to do, and it did it well. That was to throw the followers who sandals instead of sturdy shows off the track. They did this by serving up a song-free album of jagged, totally improvised jams. While it did the job at the time, and in doing so established a pattern of giving the people something other than what they want, in retrospect, you can appreciate it for another reason. Dawn of the Devi makes a pretty strong case for the trio as a rock-derived improvisational ensemble. They sound like they’re listening and responding to each other, and their transitions from acidic splatter to swooning hesitation or heavy ambush make intuitive sense. It wasn’t always that way.

Bill Meyer

These New Puritans — Inside the Rose (BMG)

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Essex experimentalists These New Puritans return with a lush yet disquieting take on English pastoralism. On Inside the Rose multi-instrumentalist twin brothers Jack and George Barnett create an often lovely, occasionally portentous, romantic paean to nature and love. As the Barnetts move further beyond the fractured post-punk of their debut Beat Pyramid, this, their fourth album, elaborates the use of contemporary classical and choral orchestration into arrangements that channel Talk Talk. Jack Barnett’s voice is high in the mix and evokes David Sylvian at his most emotive. Beneath the sheen and swooning strings George’s drumming shifts and slides between Reichian repetition and fierce Taiko inspired rhythms. Inside the Rose is a meticulously produced but never fussy collection, welcoming the listener but refusing either to compromise or patronize. A serious but accessible work full of carefully considered details, some gorgeous melodies and an almost Pre-Raphaelite sensibility expressed in a thoroughly contemporary manner.

Andrew Forell

Various Artists — No Other Love (Tompkins Square)

No Other Love : Midwest Gospel (1965-1978) by Various Artists

No Other Love is, like the several albums that Mike McGonigal has compiled for different labels, a sequence of gospel records drawn from one collection. In this case it is the collection of Ramona Stout. She culled the 45s that make up this set from her husband Kevin’s trawls of records that had spent years in Chicagoan basements. A graduate student who had spent much of her life outside the USA, she saw with clear eyes the grime of American urban poverty, and found herself deeply compelled by the discovery that hopeful music could grow in such decay. There are no big stars amongst these recordings. Even at the time they were recorded they would have sounded rough and behind the times production-wise — just electric guitars, drum kits, whatever piano or organ was sitting in the church where they were recorded, and congregants’ voices. But the fervor of yearning and the joy of release makes every track a transporting listen.

Bill Meyer

WOW — Come La Notte (Maple Death Records)

Come La Notte by wow

Underground Roman duo China Now (vocals, drums) and Leo Non (guitars) recent album as WOW, Come La Notte (Like the Night), is seven tracks of 1960s influenced Italian noir cabaret high on atmosphere and drama. Now’s almost operatic vocals are at the forefront over skeletal brushed drums, minimal bass and restrained guitar. The band lulls then surprises with a spectral sax and bursts of crashing cymbals and feedback on “Niente Di Speciale” (“Nothing Special”), a keening gypsy violin on “Vieni Un Po’ Qui” (“Come Over Here”), middle eastern organ on “Occhi Di Serpente” (“Snake Eyes”). Fatalism drips from every note bringing to mind a low ceilinged club in the catacombs where refugees from the sun fill the air with smoke and their guts with grappa and cheap vino rosso as Pasolini scouts for rough trade and fingers grip switchblades concealed in socks. Come La Notte is a slow grower that draws you in even while it picks your pocket. Put it on and live a little vicarious danger in your own private La Dolce Vita.

Andrew Forell

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pivitor · 6 years ago

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My Top 10 Favorite Albums of 2018

When it comes to music, ideas of "good" or "bad" or "best" are purely subjective. Frankly, it's ridiculous to suggest that any one person, or even any one group, has the authority to decide what the best albums of the year are, even if they did have the capacity to listen to every single release. But I love these kind of lists anyway because, at their best, they provide people the chance to gush about the music they loved in a year, the albums that challenged them, brought them joy, and helped reshape their lives. I don't necessarily think music should be ranked and judged, but it absolutely should be explored, examined, and shared.

The following is exactly that. These are my ten favorite albums of 2018, the ten albums I spent the most time with, got the most out of, and loved more than anything else released this year (that I had a chance to listen to, at least). If you've heard some of these albums before, I hope I can help you find something new to appreciate, or at least remind you why you liked them in the first place; if you haven't, then I hope you find a new song, band, or album here to love.

Let's get to it:

10. MXPX -- MXPX: There were a few really strong albums competing for this final slot, but MXPX took it through sheer consistency. Every single song on this album is just an incredibly solid block of pop-punk, bolstered by some fun, yet often unexpectedly mature, lyrics. Mike Herrera and the rest of MXPX look backwards and forward simultaneously, reminiscing about their childhood and long history as a band, but also sharing the lessons they've learned along the way; on album stand-out "Moments Like This," Herrera specifically confronts the legacy he's leaving his family, and it's surprisingly poignant. MXPX is a blueprint for how any pop-punk band can mature without losing that youthful spark that makes the genre so dang fun in the first place.

Highlights: Rolling Strong, The Way We Do, Moments Like This

9. Justin Courtney Pierre -- In The Drink: Two grueling years after the demise of Motion City Soundtrack (one of my Top Five favorite bands), former frontman Justin Courtney Pierre has returned with a solo album that manages to capture much of the spirit of MCS, but of course, with a more personal, intimate spin. Pierre still graces listeners with his intricate wordplay and earworm hooks, but also highlights some techniques and instruments that rarely took prominence in MCS (the bouncy bass in "Shoulder the Weight" is a personal favorite). In The Drink cuts right to the core of every song, especially in the exhilarating title track; the album is blistering, economical, and often ruthless, not just musically (only two songs clock in at over three minutes), but also lyrically, examining some surprisingly dark scenarios with the honesty and careful empathy fans have come to expect from Pierre. It's great to have him back (I still miss Jesse's MOOG, though).

Highlights: Anchor, Shoulder the Weight, In The Drink

8. Jeff Rosenstock -- Post-: The first album of 2018 (seriously -- Post- was a surprise release on 1/1/18) remained urgent, relevant, and relatable throughout the entire year -- that's not good for the world, but it's great for Post-. Jeff Rosenstock's social commentary is as sharp as ever, deftly mixing the political and the personal, especially in tracks like opener "USA," which dives head-first into the paranoia, apathy, and hypocrisy of modern American living. The frustration and hopelessness of trying to change a broken system coats this album like dew, but Rosenstock's approachable and energetic strain of punk make them seem manageable -- or at least bearable -- nonetheless, and closer "Let Them Win" provides much needed catharsis and hope; it's a rally cry for a better future. Post- wasn't necessarily the follow-up to Worry. that anyone expected, but it's certainly the one we needed, right when we needed it.

Highlights: Powerlessness, 9/10, Let Them Win

7. The Penske File -- Salvation: Out of all the albums on this list, Salvation by far was the biggest (and happiest) surprise. Having never heard of them before, I saw The Penske File open for (the irresistibly fun) PKEW PKEW PKEW back in October and was blown away by their harmonies, by Alex Standen's ability to balance drums and lead vocals at the same time, and most of all, by a song that dug its way into my head and wouldn't let go. That song turned out to be album stand-out "Spin My History" (easily one of my top favorite new songs of the year), and thankfully, all the best aspects of The Penske File's live show translated perfectly over to Salvation. The vocals are the perfect combination of intensity, melody, and harmony; the lyrics expertly capture and unpack moments in time; the music itself (especially when accompanied by harmonica, which pops up in a few songs) wonderfully reflects the mood of each song, be it the reckless abandon of "Lakeshore" or the aching nostalgia of "American Basements." Thanks to Salvation, I could easily see The Penske File following in the blue collar punk footsteps of bands like the Menzingers, and that's high praise indeed.

Highlights: Spin My History, Come What May, Blessed Unrest

6. Joyce Manor -- Million Dollars to Kill Me: Joyce Manor has never been a band content to make the same album twice, and Million Dollars to Kill Me not only continues the musical evolution that began on 2016's Cody, but manages to run an entire musical gamut in under 25 minutes. Million Dollars to Kill Me shows off Joyce Manor's impressive range, leaping from something approaching hardcore ("Up The Punks") to shoegaze ("Gone Tomorrow") to ballads ("I'm Not the One") to even doo wop ("Silly Games"); lead singer Barry Johnson likewise moves between the frenetic, frantic yowls of "Up The Punks" or "Big Lie" to the gentle, sing-songy joy of "Wildflowers," revealing new facets to his voice and thus finding new notes for Joyce Manor to hit. Underneath it all, though, lies some wonderfully classic emo, with Johnson channeling intelligent, introspective, and bittersweet lyrics into each and every track. Not every song on Million Dollars to Kill Me is going to work for every listener, but every single one of them is guaranteed to leave an impression.

Highlights: Big Lie, Million Dollars to Kill Me, Wildflowers

5. Bad Moves -- Tell No One: On first listen, it might be Tell No One's flawless harmonies that most catch your attention, or perhaps the bouncy, infectious melodies of its early tracks. Spend some time with it, though, and Tell No One has so much more to offer. Bad Moves makes some truly ambitious musical leaps here, especially on tracks like "Out of Reach," whose bridge and outro layers several different, contrasting harmonies over a darkly ominous riff; it's the musical equivalent of standing at the edge of a hurricane, and it's exhilarating. Ultimately, though, it may be Tell No One's lyrics that leave the greatest impression. Bad Moves creates anthems for those on the outskirts of society; Tell No One features songs about dealing with disappointing your family, forbidden romances, dark family secrets, growing up queer, facing police harassment, and the toll hiding parts of yourself can take on you, but also some uplifting tracks about using everything you've got to make life better for everyone around you. There's albums I liked more this year, but I don't think there's any lyrics that hit home for me harder than the ones on Tell No One.

Highlights: Spirit FM, Out of Reach, Missing You

4. The Get Up Kids -- Kicker: Kicker is the Get Up Kids record I've wanted for more than a decade now; it's a band recapturing lightning in a bottle. The first three tracks channel the pop-punk glory of the Red Letter Day/Something to Write Home About era without copying it wholesale (there's a rawness to the guitars and Matt Pryor's voice that was absent on those releases; it's very rock and roll), and the lyrics take that trademark Get Up Kids earnestness and update it for 2018, with Pryor and Jim Suptic tackling topics like regret, responsibility, and family with the same honesty and emotional intensity they once saved for tales of adolescent love and heartbreak. And then comes the closer, "My Own Reflection," which sounds like nothing the Get Up Kids have ever done before, a track driven by one of James Dewees' best synth-lines, some propulsive drums, and a striking, surprising bit of profanity. It's somehow upbeat and downbeat simultaneously, totally bittersweet, and thus emo in a nutshell, while also transcending so many of the genre's (and this band's) most common cliches; if these four songs are the future of the Get Up Kids, then it's a bright one indeed. The main reason Kicker isn't ranked higher on this list is because it's an EP rather than a full record (it's harder to keep this level of quality up for 12 tracks instead of 4), but let's not mince words: every single song on this EP is perfect.

Highlight: My Own Reflection

3. Save Face -- Merci: Merci would be ambitious even if it wasn't Save Face's debut release -- it's a concept album about addiction and the way it can destroy lives and relationships, accompanied by music videos for each and every track, linking together to form a visual novel of sorts. What's even more impressive than all that ambition, though, is the fact that it all works -- the overall concept forms a compelling narrative on its own, but should still resonate with anyone who's dealt with addiction or mental illness, with heartbreak and loss, with self-hatred or self-destructive habits. All those ideas are packaged within some truly explosive tunes -- Save Face's riffs are so big it's a wonder they can even be contained within the record, and singer Tyler Povanda's voice cracks with passion and mania, accompanied by some cathartic, soul-piercing screams, yet Povanda also has the range to capture the smaller, more nuanced emotions beneath all the outsized drama. The simple melodies reveal more and more layers the more you listen to them, creating a record I've returned to over and over, consistently, throughout 2018. Merci is almost as addictive as the substances its songs highlights, although in this case, that's a feature, not a bug.

Highlights: Bad, Plans, Love

2. Saves the Day -- 9: There's a line from their song "It's Such a Beautiful World" that sums up both Saves the Day and their newest album, 9, perfectly: "Let them say what they say/we're gonna play what we play." That instinct has proven polarizing at times, but as an absolute Saves the Day fanatic, I've always found it a joy and privilege to join the band as they follow their muse, and thankfully, 9 is no exception. 9 is an investigation and celebration of Saves the Day's history and legacy; some listeners have criticized this as being self-indulgent, but Saves the Day has always been a band that's channeled very specific scenarios into relatable and cathartic emotion, and at its best, 9 does just that, from the power and joy of friendship ("Side By Side") to nostalgia and the way our experiences help us change and grow ("Rendezvous"), all of it wrapped up in the power music has to bring people together (and if that last point's not something you can appreciate, then I'm not sure how you even found this list). Meanwhile, "Rosé'" provides a classic Saves the Day diss track that wouldn't feel that out of place on Stay What You Are, while the 22 minute "29" transforms frontman Chris Conley's entire life story into a sprawling epic that needs to be heard to believed. 9 also provides an opportunity for each and every member of the band to show off; lead guitarist Arun Bali continues to highlight his ability to shred in increasingly cool and unique ways, Rodrigo Palma sneaks fun bass flourishes into every song, absolutely taking charge of "1997," and Conley stretches his voice to unexpected heights, be it the yowls of "Side By Side" or the falsetto of "Saves the Day." Hell, they even kick 9 off by writing their own theme song. If you can't appreciate that, this probably isn't the album for you, but man, that is my exact kind of jam.

Highlights: Side By Side, Rosé, 29

1. The Wonder Years -- Sister Cities: I can't remember the last time I've seen an album become an essential part of a band's canon as fast as Sister Cities has, especially considering how far The Wonder Years are into their career at this point. Sister Cities is undeniably a Wonder Years album despite sounding almost nothing like what's come before, and in large part, that's due to Dan Campbell's sheer skill as a storyteller. The songs on Sister Cities pick up the ideas of compassion, connectivity, and home introduced on previous albums and take them global; Campbell discovers the similarities between his relationship and the relationship of a homeless couple despite all their differences, finds a lifeline from his overwhelming grief half a world away, and just overall finds power in exploring what holds us together as human beings rather than what splits us apart. Even the music videos tap hard into these ideas; last winter I wrote about how the video for "Sister Cities" finds power in connection, and its follow up, "Raining in Kyoto," expands upon this by cutting back and forth between life in Kyoto and Philadelphia, showing how, no matter where you go, people are just trying to live their lives the best they can. Lyrically, Campbell just keeps getting better and better, creating vivid metaphors and word pictures and finding perfect turns of phrases; he's straight-up the best in the biz at knowing just when and how to use profanity to the maximum effect (seriously, nobody else should be allowed to use the word "goddamn" in a song until they can do it even half as well as Campbell does in "Pyramids of Salt" or "Flowers Where Your Face Should Be"). Musically, Sister Cities takes big risks, and finds success, in going small more often than not, but reaches its greatest heights in closer "The Ocean Grew Hands To Hold Me," a song that just builds and builds until it reaches this epic swell of pure catharsis that just washes over you like the ocean. Honestly, Sister Cities is so emotional that it can sometimes be hard to listen to. That kind of power is that makes it my favorite album of 2018.

Highlights: Sister Cities, Flowers Where Your Face Should Be, The Ocean Grew Hands To Hold Me

#The Wonder Years #Joyce Manor #Jeff Rosenstock #Saves the Day #Saves Face #Bad Moves #MXPX #The Get Up Kids #Justin Courtney Pierre #The Penske File #Pivitor #music

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castielusive · 6 years ago

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Ray’s Miscellaneous Rec List

Several of these are unique, and a lot of my favorites are on here because of that. Assume all fics are rated explicit unless stated otherwise. WIPs are marked, but few and far between. Updates regularly.

Title: Asunder by rageprufrock

Word count: 23,817

Summary: Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder. (Matthew 19:6)

Sam gets married, Dean gets a wake up call. Easy top 3.

UPDATE: Pod fic version. It’s so good. (x).

Title: Carry On by TamrynEradani

Word count: 148087

Summary: When Sam gets into Stanford, Dean needs a bigger paycheck than Bobby’s garage can give him. Luckily, he knows a guy.

Edit: The author took this one down, but she’s said she’s fine with people reading it if they have the pdf. Hit me up if you want it.

Edit 2: Podfic version: x

Title: The Breath of All Things by KismetJeska

Rating: T

Word count: 65,404

Summary: Dean Winchester was twenty-six years old when a car accident killed his father and left him paralyzed from the waist down. A year and a half later, Dean is in a wheelchair and lives in a care home in Kansas, where he spends his days waiting to die. It’s only when Castiel Novak starts volunteering at the care home that Dean starts to wonder if a changed life always equals a ruined one.

Easily number three in my favorites.

Title: Drop Anchor by almaasi

Word count: 42,124

Summary: AU. A sailor and an enemy pirate are marooned on an island together, and while awaiting rescue they accidentally achieve domestic bliss.

Or:

Dean Winchester is lieutenant of the Royal Trading Ship Echelon. On a pleasantly sunny but particularly catastrophic day, he is marooned on an island somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean with only one man for company. That man is Castiel, captain of the black-sailed Leviathan: a pirate, no less. Given the circumstances under which they are stranded, rescue seems unlikely, and it could be aeons before a ship even comes by. The two of them may as well make the most of their own private island, personal differences be damned.

This is lovely.

Title: In the Weeds by Nanoochka

Word count: 40,265

Summary:

“Dean knew, from the minute he laid eyes on Chef Castiel MacCarthy, the day would come that he would have to kidnap the man and dump the body in the darkest, dirtiest crack den in Ireland. Given that this was Dublin city, it wouldn’t be hard to find.”

Title: make you whole by casfallsinlove

Word count: 4,531

Summary: In which there is a funeral, mixed-up feelings, quiet motel rooms, and a long journey home.

Title: 300 Things by cautionzombies

Word count: ~76,500

Summary: Dean’s life at twenty-four makes him feel like he’s forty–he works two jobs to help pay bills for his house and put his genius little brother through private school, and has spent six years (on and off, let’s be honest) working on his mechanical engineering degree at KU. With so much of his life devoted to his family, Dean has little time in his schedule for class and no time for social interaction. Then, while getting his classes together for the fall, he finds himself in a do-or-die situation: He must take his last literature class now, his spring already filled with those left for his major…except that none of the English classes will fit his schedule. This is how Dean grovels and begs Dr. Castiel Milton to make a special arrangement for him, and Dr. Milton does.

Easy top 5. Ashton’s art is what got me to read this one in the first place, and I didn’t notice it linked anywhere in the fic, so I’m sticking one here quickly. [x]

Update: Tenoko1 did an audio fic and I am completely enamored with it. [x]

Title: Significant by holyhael

Word count: 4,547

Summary: Dean Smith’s and Castiel’s unconventional morning after.

This is? Amazing?

Title: There’s No Going Back by Catchclaw

Word count: 2983

Summary: Some of the things you find on vacation are hard to bring home.

Dean Smith/ Endverse!Cas is quickly becoming my favorite thing ever.

Title: put your hands on my waist by mcpadalackles

Word count: 2,182

Summary: “Dean is sitting at the window seat in their dark bedroom, the one that opens onto the fire escape. He must be cold. He’s wearing nothing but boxers, miles and miles of lovely bare skin exposed to the cool breeze drifting in. If he is, he doesn’t seem to care.”

Short but sweet. One of my top 10.

Title: Bicker by followyourenergy

Word count: 7947

Summary: Sam Winchester is nervous. He’s taking his girlfriend of eight months, Jess, to meet his brother, Dean, and his brother’s best friend and roommate, Castiel. Sam loves his brother and loves Cas, but it seems like all the longtime friends do is bicker and he hates it. Sure enough, from the moment they arrive Dean and Cas are at it. Sam thinks he knows what’s best for the two of them, but Sam ends up learning a few things about love and relationships that he never expected.

[NEW] Title: Smells Like Queer Spirit by ChasingRabbits

Word count: 8,364

Summary: It's been ten years since Sam Winchester has seen his brother. However, just as he's come to terms with the likelihood that he will never see Dean again, fate (and the internet) intervene and Sam is finally able to track him down.

What he finds throws him for a monstrous, brain-scrambling loop.

A series with a lot of variety. Not every piece is my favorite, but this one and the last two are great.

[NEW] Title: Mr. & Mr. Smith by amarillogrande

Word count: 26,550

Summary: Dean and Castiel Winchester are a normal married couple, living a normal life in a normal suburb, working normal jobs—both as secret deadly assassins. When they find each other as targets, their quest to kill each other leads them to learn a lot more about each other than they ever did in five (or six) years of marriage.

Canonverse and (mostly) canon divergent:

[NEW] Title: A Little Company by VioletHaze

Word count: 48,585

Summary: After Cas became human, he and Dean finally stopped dancing around what existed between them. The vulnerability of the newly-fallen angel scared the hell out of Dean, scared him enough to decide that he was ready to stop pretending and make some serious changes.

Now, five years later, they'd retired from hunting to live a "normal" life in Sioux Falls complete with a house and a brand-new adopted baby daughter. Against all odds, Dean had found that the civilian life he'd always scoffed at nearly overwhelmed him with joy.

But Dean knew better than to bask in it; the world was a dangerous place and a happiness like that depended on him safeguarding his little piece of it.

[NEW] Title: Hunting for Faith by perunamuusa and riseofthefallenone

Word count: 270,952

Summary: It starts a few days earlier.

Castiel first notices it in the middle of the night when the dreams of fire and screams have kept him awake. He’s kneeling before the altar, praying, when the glass in the windows start to shake, the very air vibrating around him. Castiel is on his feet and reaching for the gun tucked into the back of his pants as the shutters over the windows start to rattle.

Title: Bring up the Deep by beenghosting

Word count: 22,679

Summary: They went back and forth on whether or not to make the drive until Sam found an article in the town’s local paper dated a week earlier about a lobster fisherman who swore a monster sank his boat.

Case fic!

Title: The Five People You Meet in Heaven by amarillogrande

Word count: 22,237

Summary: Heaven is white.

Well. Isn’t that fucking stereotypical

Dean isn’t really sure how he got here. Or even why he’s here. And hell, for all the times the Winchesters have died, he thinks he ought to know the drill by now. But what he doesn’t know is when most folks go, they find something different.

There’s a system God put in place. That when you’re gone (for good) there’s a couple things you gotta do first.

There are five people waiting for you.They are the five people you meet in heaven.

Best canonverse fic I have ever read.

Title: Faith Healer by punkascas

Word count: 75,087

Summary: Dean hates faith healers. Scam artists and power-hungry dicks, all of them. But with Sam nearing the end of his rope and desperate for a way to keep their father’s last words from being true, Dean has no choice but to turn to the enigmatic and irascible Castiel, more tattooed junkie than spiritual leader, in hopes of finding a way to cure Sam. Yet Castiel hides dangerous secrets, and Dean soon learns they have more to worry about than just Yellow Eyes and Sam’s growing demonic abilities. War is coming. Canon divergent after 2.10.

Title: Dean (and Cas’) Top 13 Zepp Traxx by pantheon_of_discord

Word count: 82,450

Summary: Dean eases Baby down the frontage road, trying not to look in the rearview mirror as his home gets smaller and smaller behind him.

He’s done this a hundred times. He’s driven down this road in the soft morning light, heading out to some little town in some distant corner of the country. This is a job like any other.

“It’s not like we’re never coming back,” Cas says from the passenger seat.

Dean and Cas and the open road, to the tune of Led Zeppelin. A post-series story in thirteen parts.

Title: where the weeds take root by beenghosting

Word Count: 16,450 (so far)

Summary: “Are you happy? Y’know. Just—being here,” Dean says, gesturing to the yard with his beer bottle. “Being with—I mean, you used to fight in celestial wars and—and save the world. Now you’re growing vegetables and talking about chickens.”

Title: new testament [just more of the same ‘verse] by outpastthemoat

Word Count: 46,880

Summary: No heaven. No hell. Just Dean and Cas and the status quo.

#fic rec #deancas

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jezfletcher · 4 years ago

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1000 Albums 2021: Albums #30-21

Greetings friends! And welcome to yet another year of my 1000 Albums project. This year, we heard a total of 1,172 albums in fact, plus an additional 506 singles not as part of an album or EP. As usual, music is excellent, listening to music is excellent, and I’m here to share with you some of my particular favourite music I’ve heard in the last 12 months.

Posting schedule will be Albums this week, leading up to Xmas, and then Tracks next week, leading up to the new year. I’m writing up my top 30 of each, which I’ll follow with a more exhaustive list of my Top 100 Albums and Tracks of the year, for the sake of completeness.

#30. Grace Petrie - Connectivity (queer folk)

This is a great album, and a great way to kickoff my writeups of the week. Petrie does a wonderfully cynical line in lightly comic folk, backed up by some good country-adjacent instrumentation. This runs from the trad-folk sounds of Storm To Weather, to the bittersweet love song to your straight best-friend The Last Man On Earth ("You won't choose me/Over the last man on earth"). The key thing here though is that it's great folk music at its heart. It's taking some of the quite staid tropes of English trad folk and really claiming them in another space entirely. A clever, amusing, and often quite touching album.

Recommended Track: The Last Man On Earth You'll like it if you like: subverting traditional musical genres

#29. The Fratellis - Half Drunk Under a Full Moon (indie pop rock)

The Fratellis are in a wonderful afternoon period of their careers right now. After the excellent In Your Own Sweet Time in 2018, they've followed up with another album that shows they can still put together a catchy rock tune with the best of them. But more than that, there's a sense that they're very comfortable, and willing to just do the things which bring them joy. One of the best tracks here was released in 2020, Six Days In June, and made my top tracks list last year, but there are plenty of others that bolster the album, and show that 2018's effort was not a surprising bolt from a formerly famous group.

Recommended Track: Living In The Dark You'll Like it if you like: The Fratellis; and who honestly doesn't like The Fratellis?

#28. The War on Drugs - I Don't Live Here Anymore (indie rock)

I'm really pleased to see this album up so high on my list (remember, I listened to something like 1200 albums this year, and screened probably 10 times that many, so #28 is very high). The War on Drugs did a great abum in 2017 as well, and this was an excellent follow up. It channels the early alt-rock movement while still feeling current and novel—there's a lightness to the introspective indie rock that suggests almost a kind of pop hook to everything. On top of this there's something about the way the songs perfectly embody the essence of the songwriting—it's as though you get the sense that the versions of these songs you get on the albums are their ultimate representation, as though there's never going to be a version of these songs that better connects to the core of what they are. This is honestly pretty rare, and to have it so consistently done across an album is rarer still.

Recommended Track: Old Skin You'll like it if you like: perfectly crafted songs in their pure forms

#27. King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard - Butterfly 3000 (psychedelic rock)

I don't know at what point I became a happy little King Giz Boy, but I sure do love what they do now. This is one of two (2) albums that they released this year (another is scheduled for release on New Year's Eve), and this is the more approachable, poppier one. Which isn't to say that they've given up on the deep grooving psychedelia—here, though, it's laced with a dusting of synths and often a beat that you could imagine as much on the dancefloor as the moshpit. There are a couple of standout tracks here, resting on their groove and providing a very chilled out psychedelic experience. My pick goes to Catching Smoke which gives absolutely the best embodiment of everything that's good about this album, and moreove what sets this album apart from King Giz's many other albums.

Recommended Track: Catching Smoke You'll like it if you like: grooving psychedelia, but also getting down on the dance floor

#26. Passenger - Songs for the Drunk & Broken Hearted (folk pop)

It wouldn't be an end of the year list without a Passenger album on it, and the years in which he doesn't release anything feel like they're missing something. This is another fine album from the master of folk pop—catchy, well-written pop songs, done in a pared-back unpretentious way. It's simple in some ways, but he manages to draw out many melodies and moods from the same basic formula. Passenger's distinctive vocals aren't for everyone, but if you're hooked into his songwriting, like I am, the slightly raspy, lispy pronunciation functions the same way as Pavlov's bells did to his dogs. When it comes down to it I like his voice—it's got personality and uniqueness, while still being evocative and true. Again, there was plenty to like in this album, including a long line of leading singles, but I'll go with a classic sounding track that could have been from any moment in his career: Tip of My Tongue.

Recommended Track: Tip of My Tongue You'll like it if you like: easy singer-songwriter pop, and you'll love it if you already like Passenger

#25. Sandhya - Innocent Monster (vocal jazz)

This kicks off with a (ahem) monster of a track (Monster); a raging jazz-rock tune in 15/8, heavy on the bass-end of the piano. It's the grab and pull that draws you into the album. Sandhya's vocals are a competent kind of warbling jazz in the middle register, but get personality and punch when she lets some of the ragged edges show. It's hard to go past Monster as my pick from the album, but there's also the wonderful dirge-like All Purpose Lament, which seems to channel Soundgarden's Black Hole Sun to close it out. All up a great album—not a traditional jazz album by any measure, but one that takes barbershop in strange new directions.

Recommended Track: Monster You'll like it if you like: jazz influences in your rock, or rock influences in your jazz

#24. The Lathums - How Beautiful Life Can Be (indie rock)

The Lathums do some really wonderful throwback indie rock—it feels at one moment that you're back in the era of 80s Cure, but also part of the British Invasion, even with elements of classic heartland rock. But all this adds up to is a band which feels surprisingly apt for right now. There's a sense of nostalgia, perhaps twinged with a hint of disquiet—but the overall effect is quite uplifting. It's a kind of weirdly pure album, and does feel in some ways like a debut: it's open and honest. But it needs to be built on strong foundations for that to really work without seeming twee or self-conscious. My pick is the opening track, which really sets the tone for the rest of the album.

Recommended Track: Circles of Faith You'll like it if you like: any era of pop rock from about 1964 onwards

#23. Ross Gay - Dilate Your Heart (spoken word poetry set to various music)

Here's a new genre that has had a surprisingly strong year (there's another album which we called "spoken word poetry set to various music" in the #30-40 decade, which I'm not writing up). Ross Gay is an American poet who brings a genuinely wonderful performance style to his evocative, heartening poems. He speaks with passion, potency and rhythm, bringing alive his words in a way that maximises their impact. Each of the poems features a guest artist who sets about providing accompanying music. And they are certainly impactful poems, including the meditation on thankfulness Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, to reflections on his father's death and his final resting place, Burial. This latter one is my pick of the album, which is tenderly augmented by atmospheric harp from the great Mary Lattimore.

Recommended Track: Burial You'll like it if you like: spoken word poetry. To be honest, you do probably need to be on board with the idea on some level to love this album

#22. Pale Waves - Who Am I? (90s pastiche alt rock)

There is a certain burgeoning nostalgia for the 90s at the moment, and one of my favourite examples from this year is this album from Pale Waves. Following along with a pop punk kind of aesthetic, but a more classic 90s pop sound, Pale Waves bring some tuneful lyric-forward bangers laced with a reminiscence of the era of emo. For some reason, though, it feels brightly reinventive at the same time. It goes beyond having a same-sex love ballad (although this would have probably torpedoed a commercially released album in the 90s)—there's something that its doing in synthesising the cynicism of the post-grunge alt-rock with a kind of Gen Z optimism. I think it's a style that's due for more attention.

Recommended Track: She's My Religion You'll like it if you like: femme punk, but want it more tuneful and more radio-friendly

#21. Horsey - Debonair (hardcore jazz punk)

Ah, Horsey, what a wonderfully bananas album. It finds itself somewhere between easy jazz rock and highly aggressive punk, and although it's whiplash erratic at points, it always seems to rein it in (pun intended). There's a sense in this album that it's barely containing itself from becoming grindcore—as though it could devolve at any moment into jagged screams about stabbing people. And this is despite the fact that much of it is based around light jazz piano and syncopated but light drum patterns. It's honestly a wonderful sense of tension across the album that provides its own sense of fraught balance—it's not a judicious sense of "everything in its place". It's more like "everything is in the wrong place" which somehow equates to the same thing.

Recommended Track: Lagoon You'll like it if you like: ice cream and bacon, together at last.

#1000 albums #albums #best of the year #1000albums

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computerguideworld-blog · 6 years ago

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Dirty Computer: Janelle Monaes Electrifying Coming Out Party

New Post has been published on https://computerguideto.com/must-see/dirty-computer-janelle-monaes-electrifying-coming-out-party-2/

Dirty Computer: Janelle Monaes Electrifying Coming Out Party

Janelle Mones new album Dirty Computer features the acclaimed singer-songwriter at her most revealing and freewheeling.

The 32-year-old star is one of the most respected in music, and shes won raves and challenged listeners with an ambitious blend of funk, pop, rock, soul, and hip-hop that has often made her hard to define. But being pinned down has never been Mones styleand on Dirty Computer she lets her freak flag fly.

Mone has admitted that her early android persona and conceptual The Metropolis and ArchAndroid projects were sometimes driven by the need to protect herself from judgment. As Mone has evolved as an artist, shes come into her own creatively and as a womanand now seems fully in command of her art and emboldened by living in her truth. Like virtually every full-length release in her genre-bending discography, Mones Dirty Computer is a conceptual affair: In the accompanying short film, shes Jane 57821, a nonconformist in the near future who needs to be cleaned by the powers-that-be. Shes a rebel in love with her community and in love with Zen (Tessa Thompson)and shes fighting to be herself.

Arriving a whopping five years after 2013s The Electric Lady, the new album finds Mone simultaneously at her most musically accessible and her most forthcoming lyrically. It feels like shes the most free on record that shes ever been. Not that Mone has ever seemed constrained, exactlybut her work has always seemed to put the concept ahead of emotional nakedness. On Dirty Computer, the concept is driven by her introspection, not the other way around. This is the strongest set of pop songs that Mone has released, as she dances between sunshine synth-pop, dance-driven funk jams, and lush soul. Working alongside longtime collaborators like Deep Cotton and Roman GianArthur, Mone isnt in altogether unfamiliar territory musically, but she is breaking bold new ground in terms of themes, and shes putting them across in more engaging ways than she has before.

It sounds like an anthem for youthful brazenness and epic summer nights; it also sounds like a spiritual manifesto.

The album opens with the Brian Wilson-assisted title track, with Wilsons trademark only-but-him harmonies providing a warm bed on which Mones warm lead vocal coos, I love you in space and time, with sparsely skittering production. With its twinkling chords and cascading drums, Crazy Classic Life channels 80s synth sounds a la Depeche Mode as Mone outlines her version of freedom: I am not Americas nightmareI am the American cool. She wants a crazy classic life, and shes perfectly OK with however it ends as long as shes done it all. It sounds like an anthem for youthful brazenness and epic summer nights; it also sounds like a spiritual manifesto. The synth vibes remain on Take A Byte, and its a pure party: The thumping groove and handclaps are dance-floor-perfect, as Mone sings, Dress me upI like it better when we both pretend, in one of the most effectively sensual and slinky moments on Dirty Computer.

Princes influence looms large on Dirty Computer, an album that owes a lot to his most personally affirming dance anthems like Uptown and Erotic City. The guitar-driven Screwed even opens with a rhythm-guitar lick thats a clear nod to his 1986 classic Kiss, but presented in a completely different musical context. Sex, bodywere gonna crash your party, sounds like the best kind of warning, as Mone provides yet another song that sounds like it was made for the best weekend youve ever had.

This is a fucking fun album.

Django Jane debuted online back in February, with Mone trying on trap and showing that her creativity sits comfortably at virtually any stylistic table. Sassy, classyKool-Aid with the kale, Janelle raps confidentlyand with more panache than most others who regularly trade in the format. Remember when they said I looked to mannish? she pointedly recalls, reminding everyone that during her ArchAndroid days she wasnt always the beloved pop culture icon she is today. She deftly addresses gender, race, and her own still-growing legacy as an artistperfectly seguing into Pynk, the other previously released single that had fans salivating in early April.

The double entendre of the title/hookand the cheekily clever music videois sort of a second affirmation of Django Jane. The color pink serves as a metaphor for both the universality of human existence and the specificity of womanhood. When the surging guitar and Some like that! hook kick in, its clear that Mone knew she had another anthem here.

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Prince collaborated with Mone directly and Make Me Feel is an appropriate tribute, homage, and confirmation that no mainstream artist embodies His Royal Badness most provocative, singularly focused creativity as much as Janelle Mone. That groove burns itself into your brain within seconds, when that all-too-distinctive rhythm guitar begins punching holes in the pace, as Janelle ad-libs a joyful screechit sounds like an old friend making a welcome appearance at this Mone-led party. Prince lives. Pharrell shows up for I Got the Juice, as Mone flaunts and taunts a bitover African rhythms and a percolating beat.

I Like That is the most atmospheric moment on Dirty Computer, a gorgeous melody carried on a wave of synth strings, as Mone sings, A little crazy, little sexy, little cool / Little rough around the edges but I keep it smooth / Im always left of center and thats right where I belong / Im the random minor note you hear in major songs. She drops a brief rhyme about a childhood crush who rated me a 6 after she cut her perm, but makes it clear that she always knew I was the shit. And she goes for 90s neo-soul vibes on Dont Judge Me, a song that addresses personal insecurity and the fear that comes from wanting to open and be your real self around the person who makes you feel the most loved but also the most scared: Even though you tell me you love meIm afraid that you just love my disguise.

That element of fear is revisited on So Afraid, a somber, guitar-driven tune that somewhat recalls the 60s vibes of the title track. Theres so much to be gained by running toward love, but Janelle Mone expresses the doubt and apprehension of emotional connections beautifully here. And she parodies the jingoism and paranoia that defines so much of the good ol US of A on the rollicking album closer Americana. Once again playfully tapping into her Prince-ish tendencies, Mone offers a nod to the foot-stomping raucousness of Lets Go Crazy, while taking aim at everything from traditional gender roles to xenophobia to generic Americana. Its an upbeat end to an album full of joy and freedom, and it offers its best line: I wonder if you were blind, would it help you make a better decision.

Janelle Mone has been one of the most era-defining artists of the past 10 years, and shes done it without the kind of all-world hit singles that seem to define pop culture status. Shes managed to carve a niche in contemporary music that is uniquely her own, and here shes created the kind of album that gives voice to the creative, proudly outside-the-box individuals that have fueled so much of the cultural and social change of the times. The android Cindi Mayweather gave Mone a persona on which to explore her boldest ideas, but in putting who she is front-and-center, Mone has delivered her most relatable work to date. And it couldnt come at a better time. Black women have been leading a cultural charge, and Mone sits alongside so many of the boldest women of her generation. With Dirty Computer, shes given us a stellar pro-woman, pro-LGBTQ, party like its 1999, middle-finger-to-the-status-quo dance record.

There has beenand will continue to bea lot written about Mones coming out in the latest issue of Rolling Stone and how this album is reflective of her desire to be her. She said in the interview: Being a queer black woman in America someone who has been in relationships with both men and womenI consider myself to be a free-ass motherfucker. Mone has long been an inspiration to anyone who dared to be themselves, and her latest art documents an important moment in her journey as a creator and as an individual. Its exciting to witness her come into her own.

And it sounds like shes having a blast.

Read more: https://www.thedailybeast.com

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diamonddeposits · 7 years ago

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BEST TRACKS OF 2017-ARTISTS LIST #87

Brooklyn based post-funk balladeer Fusilier releases tunes that make you want to dance! Here he shares the tunes that made his 2017!

1. L'Rain -- Heavy (But Not in Wait)

L'Rain's album starts like the first stripe of red in the sky at dawn. That language might seem overly cinematic in most cases, but these gorgeous twinkly guitar loops (that are just as great live BTW) merit my most flowery prose. Don't get me wrong, this song and album as a whole are as striking for their sincerity as for their beauty. Every track is a master class in being both approachable and worth the encounter.

2. Steve Lacy -- Dark Red

Picking a favorite song off of the Steve Lacy EP is like picking your favorite side at Thanksgiving. If your family is like mine, you're just happy to be at the table. The song that I think works best for my voice when I'm dancing around the house in my underwear is the one that happened to have been everywhere. Dark Red is a bop a swing and a do si do. It's the sort of modern retro hit that would have always been and will always be exciting.

3. Rah Rah Gabor -- Omar Back

I gotta say, this song coulda been trash and still have won me over for it's use of the name and sounds of one of my favorite queer characters, the iconic Omar Little from The Wire. When you find out it's not Omar comin, but Rah Rah, it's not any less savage. Rah Rah so effortless paints pictures of the life they want at any cost that it makes me want to ask for more. This song is an anthem for me at my most used. When my face is bruised from fighting for my life (metaphorically for me maybe not for you) I look myself dead in the face and repeat before I leave the house, you come at the king you best not miss.

4. Show Me the Body ft Dreamcrusher -- Hungry

I went to a Dreamcrusher show over the summer, which anyone who has seen them can attest, is a total sensory experience. Throughout all the fog and confusion of lights and cameras, the synth pattern changed and this new figure climbs the stage and hits his head with the microphone and I swear to baby jesus the 15 year old me had never been so happy in his life. This track is the perfect accompaniment to a day in the twentieth century decay that is the modern American city. It's kind of trap, but not rap and kind of rock but completely electronic. It is the future. Bear witness

5. BbyMutha -- Rules

Other things that make teenage me happy is old Three 6 Mafia and southern rap in general. So when I was at the knockdown center in February and they announced that there was a rapper from Tennessee coming up, I was more than willing to give it a shot. I was there with friends dancing and having a good time when BbyMutha laid down the rules, and I had to stop to listen. She was preaching the gospel. For anybody moving from say Sarasota to Queens looking to start a new life trying to figure out where they went wrong, BbyMutha will tell you exactly what you can and cannot do if you want to stay above the fray. YOU CAN'T GIVE... well go see what she say. It will change your life.

6. Sza -- Supermodel

This whole list a things that make me tick and anyone who knows me or has heard a sneak of my upcoming EP (wink wink) knows, strummed major 7th guitar chords are on the fucking list. So needless to say, this charm of a track had me hooked before Sza's first breath. But after she does take that breath, what comes out had my face hot and wet with tears of joy. This track is raw in the way that I think is the entire point of the artist, namely to elevate what we're told to obscure when it feels dishonest to hide. This whole album is full of anthems for those that want to be their whole selves, but when Sza sings these lyrics over a track with none of the safety of a full pop production she gives permission to be just a little extra vulnerable every day.

7. Katie Von Schleicher -- Soon

When I need cheering up, I don't listen to happy music. I listen to music that understands my mood and reminds me that sadness can be its own gift on the way to greater spaces. Von Schleicher's discography is more or less that in a nutshell for me personally, but no where is the feeling more acute than in Soon, a song made to close the curtain on a defeat to get ready to play on. I'm gonna get there soon...

8. Residente -- Desencuentro

Residente traveled the world with a map based on his own DNA trying to better understand his own identity and made music out of it. The album is peppered with explorations of the body and its relation to the universe at large. If that sounds a touch pretentious, I swear it's not. It promises no answers just questions and observations. My favorite track is his duet with French artist Soko. It's an arresting piano ballad about being beautifully out of sync with another person. An image that comes to fruition when the two sing the same melody in two different languages at each other. Fine, maybe it's a little pretentious but if you've lived in New York in the spring you've been there.

9. Ho99o9 -- Street Power

People think punk isn't a black genre. I beg to differ and so does Ho99o9. Plus this isn't your nazi cousin's punk. This is the 21st century where we can put 808s and trap high hats in a song and still mosh because we're cultured adults who as a collective are mad as hell and dying to show you what we can do together.

10. Benjamin Clementine -- Quintessence

This song is Debussy meets Nina Simone which is to say that it's hands down the prettiest thing I've heard this year. Benjamin Clementine makes music that can stop time, but is not without its edges. This song is the sound of solemnly accepting ones duty. It's the sound of responsibility in all of its humbling weight. It's the sound of resistance. It reminds me that revolution can be found in smiles. And that love can be the ultimate act of rebellion.

#best of 2017 #fusilier #BENJAMIN CLEMENTINE #ho99o9 #residente #katie von schleicher #sza #bbymutha #show me the body #dreamcrusher #rah rah gabor #steve lacy #l'rain

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ricardosousalemos · 8 years ago

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Pet Shop Boys: Behaviour

Pet Shop Boys arrived in the second half of the ’80s to out-gay essentially everybody. Combining Oscar Wilde-ian wit, compositional and lyrical sophistication that harkened back to Cole Porter and Noël Coward, sartorial style that split the difference between uptown chic (singer Neil Tennant) and downtown rough trade (keyboardist Chris Lowe), and a command of ’80s club music that soon proved itself far more comprehensive than most of their contemporaries, this North England-raised/London-based synthpop duo aestheticized gay life long before Tennant came out in 1994. Every LGBT person knew exactly what the pair meant in the chorus of “It’s A Sin,” arguably the angriest and certainly most overtly anti-Catholic chorus ever to top the UK pop chart and reach the US Top 10:

“Everything I’ve ever done

Everything I ever do

Every place I’ve ever been

Everywhere I’m going to

It’s a sin”

But after becoming one of the most internationally prominent acts of the ’80s with hits like their UK/US #1 “West End Girls,” Tennant and Lowe entered the ’90s knowing their “imperial phase” of uninterrupted success was over: Setting “Ché Guevara and Debussy to a disco beat,” their quintessential manifesto “Left to My Own Devices” stalled at #84 on Billboard’s pop chart in late ’88; their ’89 collaboration with Liza Minnelli, Results, pretty much flopped in North America beyond gay dancefloors, and the ’90 comeback they helped helm for Dusty Springfield, Reputation, didn’t even get a US release—despite all of them doing quite well in the UK.

Following these alternately sunny and frosty records, they released their decidedly autumnal fourth album Behaviour in the fall of 1990. Like the Cure’s Disintegration, Depeche Mode’s Violator, and George Michael’s Listen Without Prejudice, it would transition their creators into the new decade by both refining and breaking from the past. The time was right, for the duo and indeed much of its following were now in mourning. Singer/lyricist Tennant’s longtime best friend had recently died of AIDS. So had Robert Mapplethorpe, who shot some of their Please-period publicity photos, and Keith Haring, who similarly intersected fine art and the club scene. Reported US AIDS cases were well over 100,000, with millions on the way globally, and despite the earliest AIDS drugs like AZT, which in those days often made people sicker, an HIV-positive test result was still pretty much a death sentence. Created in resistance to a mainstream that treated LGBTs as subhuman, the queer culture of defiance and liberation that shaped ’70s disco and much of ’80s pop—particularly PSB’s hybrid of both—was literally dying.

Unfolding like an elegy for much of what had gone before, Behaviour shifted the Boys from sly commentators to reserved-but-pained participants, with its understated but devastating lead track, “Being Boring.” The first verse presents the singer looking through keepsakes, as one does after losing a loved one. He finds a party invite paraphrasing Zelda Fitzgerald’s “Eulogy on the Flapper,” specifically the line “She refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn’t boring.” Boredom was a prickly subject for the pair: Their early deadpan videos and TV appearances were routinely dismissed by clueless critics as generating it.

Set in the ’70s, the next verse depicts the singer leaving his hometown, a mandatory rite of LGBT passage. He softly declares, “I’d bolted through a closing door,” an image evoking both the end of his closeted adolescence and the beginning of fully realized adulthood. By the third verse, which is set in the ’90s, the singer is self-actualized, but reflective: “All the people I was kissing/Some are here, and some are missing.” That simple rhyme still reduces gay men who lived through this era to tears, for AIDS had sorted our intimates into these two categories—those who died young, and those who might soon follow suit, including ourselves. If you hadn’t seen your gay neighbors and friends and former sexual partners around town, chances were they were dead, had gone home to die, or were nursing the dying just like you. “But I thought in spite of dreams,” the survivor sings of his fallen pal, “you’d be sitting somewhere here with me.”

Fashion photographer Bruce Weber shot the song’s lush B&W video, which features models enacting a fantasy version of the parties Tennant attended in the ’70s. The tension between the freedom of Weber’s imagery and the sadness of the third verse makes the eulogy even more devastating, but some fleeting nudity meant that MTV in America had an excuse not to show it. Still, “Being Boring”—ostensibly a dance track, but one featuring fluttering rhythms, a Larry Heard-style deep house bassline that appears only as the album version fades out, a subtle upward chorus modulation that adds sweetness to the sorrow, and a whirring plastic tube conjuring spectral cries—eventually earned its rightful acclaim. A fan site solely devoted to it dwarfs the official web presence of many bands, and on its 20th anniversary, a Guardian critic proclaimed it the greatest single of all time. Even Axl Rose allegedly bemoaned its non-appearance during the duo’s 1991 tour.

That tour, Performance, their first in North America, transformed the staginess of their videos into opulent theater just as Blonde Ambition did for Madonna the year before; in the Pets’ case, it was so over-budget that the well-attended trek still lost half-a-million dollars. And just as the autobiographical Like a Prayer fed Blonde Ambition, the personal nature of Behaviour lent Performance pathos. The dirge that opened the show, “This Must Be the Place I Waited Years to Leave,” affirmed that, like Madonna, Tennant suffered major Catholic damage. The tune is hummable, but the tone intersects opera and Joy Division as it evokes Catholic mass, freezing rain, and grey architecture. No wonder the Pets eschewed the church for wit and disco.

True to their queer sensibility, PSB are intrinsically contrary, even with themselves, and just as their previous release, 1988’s Introspective, is all 12”-length dance numbers, Behaviour is mostly ballads. Even on overt club cuts, its lead single “So Hard” and “The End of the World,” the dance grooves that defined the duo are muted: No more big ’80s drums, no electro rumble or hi-NRG clatter, even if “So Hard” ramps up the trademark orchestral blasts of their previous hits. Rather than the sample-heavy rave bleeps that ruled 1990 UK pop, the album favors analogue synths overseen by co-producer Harold Faltermeyer, the Munich synth whiz who’d been Giorgio Moroder’s key player and had scored with Beverly Hills Cop’s “Axel F.”

But though the instrumentation is mostly as synthetic as before, it’s less pointedly so; the future was no longer as inviting as it had been in the duo’s formative years, when they dreamt of man-machines and home computers. Embracing their humanism to mirror their messages, the pair often blur the boundaries between synthetic and natural sounds: Mirroring the instability of post-communist Russia, “My October Symphony” fuses banging Italo-house piano, “Funky Drummer” syncopation, Marvin Gaye-esque yearning, and the classical strings of Balanescu Quartet, which all blend with the Prophets and Rolands and Marr’s wah-wah guitar so seamlessly that the hybrid suggests Shostakovich going Blaxploitation. You certainly couldn't call it just “synthpop.”

In the booklet for the album’s 2001 deluxe reissue, Tennant paints the unabashed love aria “To Face the Truth” as the story of a man who cannot acknowledge his girlfriend’s infidelities. But like so many PSB songs, it makes more sense in an LGBT context; that his lover is a bisexual who dodges their emotional bond. Having same-gender sex dictates that you’re homosexual, but loving someone of your own gender makes you gay—a step too far for some. “I wonder if you care and cannot bear the proof/It hurts too much to face the truth,” Tennant croons at the top of his tenor. Having just worked with Liza and Dusty, he’d suddenly become a more expressive singer, one here as adept at conveying sincerity as he’d always been at generating irony. The programmed rhythms hail from ’80s R&B, but his vocal is ’70s Bee Gees; had this been on the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, we’d all know it.

Lyrically the most old-school PSB-y song of the lot, “How Can You Expect to Be Taken Seriously?” roasts sanctimonious rock stars who claim to hate fame’s machinations but nevertheless align themselves with the trendiest causes. There’d been plenty of those in the wake of Band Aid, Live Aid, Farm Aid, and “We Are the World,” and they pretty much wiped out the more subversive and often queer “New Pop” movement that spawned the Pets. The album version is set atypically to a New Jack Swing beat, the kind that gave even Boy George a US R&B radio hit with “Don’t Take My Mind on a Trip” the year before, but the seldom heard single/video version remixed it into a more flattering Soul II Soul-style shuffle. Back home, its critique was bolstered by appearing on the flipside of their newly recorded medley of U2’s “Where the Streets Have No Name” and the Four Seasons’ “I Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You,” which echoed Boys Town Gang’s shamelessly camp disco-ization of the latter. Bono, who spotted the satirical finger being pointed in his direction, quipped, “What have we done to deserve this?”

As straightforward as “Seriously” is skewed, album closer “Jealousy” goes furthest in a quasi-symphonic direction. Played on keyboards but booming like a massive orchestra, it’s fraught with romantic angst like their earliest work, yet it suits their new phase of unfettered emotionality. The scene-setting opening conjures the outsized ardor of 19th-century art song: “At dead of night when strangers roam/The streets in search of anyone who’ll take them home/I lie alone��” And the rest similarly picks up where Scott Walker’s covers of Jacques Brel left off.

A crooner, not a belter, Tennant sets his vocal understatement against the over-the-top nature of his blinding passion for an unrequited love. This conflict mirrors the LGBT experience itself: You’ve got all this desire that must somehow be contained to a small percentage of the population, lest you find yourself making a pass at someone who might not share your sexuality and who might respond with condemnation or even violence. So you keep your outer voice small and whispery like Tennant’s, but that constant monitoring and muting only intensifies your inner life, and so you bear the burden of these feelings—here represented by the grandness of the orchestration the despair of the descending vocal melody, the processional horns that bear a stubbornly regal retreat. There’s no apology implied—quite the opposite.

Simpatico women understand this proud juxtaposition: Liza Minnelli considers Tennant and Lowe geniuses akin to Broadway maestro Stephen Sondheim or her dad. Pet Shop Boys critique masculinity the way classic rock bands exude it, but rather than the flamboyance that’s intrinsic to the gay pop star from Little Richard onward, PSB offer the calm control of the outsider looking in, their noses pressed against the shop window.

Having experienced worldwide eminence exactly when their people fell into deeper crisis than ever, they rarely took the easy path, and on subsequent releases like Very’s “Dreaming of the Queen,” they imagined a world in which there were no more lovers left alive. Fortunately, people kept dancing, and Pet Shop Boys still supply their nocturnal soundtrack. Last month, Billboard announced PSB as the all-time top male act on its dance club chart: With last year’s “The Pop Kids,” they landed their 40th hit on that list in 30 years, and 11th No. 1. That they did so with a song as wistful as those on Behaviour makes this achievement truly singular. Embracing disposable pop, they’ve created lasting queer culture just as it was in danger of disappearing. They celebrate the melancholia of being gay.

#reviews-albums

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qnewsau · 8 months ago

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Vengaboys are coming!

New Post has been published on https://qnews.com.au/vengaboys-are-coming/

Vengaboys are coming!

The Vengaboys bring nostalgic 90s dance anthems, queer pride, and flamboyant fun to Australia!

The Vengaboys are back, and they’re ready to bring their iconic blend of Eurodance pop and flamboyant fun to Australia in 2025 with their much-anticipated 90s Mania tour!

For those of us who’ve partied to their classic hits in our youth (or are still living for them today), the thought of hearing “Boom, Boom, Boom, Boom!!” or “We Like to Party” live again is enough to get our glittery outfits ready. But this tour isn’t just about reliving the 90s; it’s a celebration of their enduring legacy, the unapologetic joy they represent, and the special connection they’ve cultivated with the LGBTIQA+ community.

Let’s take a moment to embrace the rainbow-soaked nostalgia and look forward to what promises to be a tour packed with love, inclusivity, and high-energy fun.

Who Are the Vengaboys?

If you’ve ever attended a pride parade, a drag show, or a retro party, you’ve probably danced your heart out to at least one Vengaboys track. The group shot to global fame in the late 90s with their infectious beats, catchy lyrics, and camp aesthetic.

The original lineup included D-Nice (Denise van Rijswijk), Kim Sasabone, Roy (Robby) den Burger, and Yorick Bakker, though like all pop acts, there have been a few lineup changes over the years.

Today, the group continues to tour with their iconic blend of vibrant personalities and dazzling performances.

Their music, a cheeky blend of Eurodance and pop, has been beloved by fans across the world for decades. From the whimsical and carefree “We’re Going to Ibiza” to the bold and suggestive “Up & Down,” the Vengaboys gave us an escape from reality, encouraging us to dance, laugh, and not take life too seriously.

And let’s face it — their campy style was everything! Think sailors, cowboys, neon everything, and a disco-ball aesthetic that screamed fun, freedom, and self-expression.

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A Love Affair with the LGBTIQA+ Community

The Vengaboys’ connection with the LGBTIQA+ community isn’t just about their flamboyant costumes and over-the-top performances. It’s in the DNA of their music — their songs represent freedom, inclusivity, and joy, which resonates deeply within queer spaces. Their concerts have always been a safe space where anyone can dance like no one’s watching, regardless of who they love or how they identify.

Over the years, the Vengaboys have become a staple at Pride events, embodying the spirit of acceptance and celebration. Whether performing at Pride festivals in Europe or headlining at clubs where queer culture thrives, they’ve always embraced their role as icons for the LGBTIQA+ audience.

Their music is synonymous with carefree joy, and in many ways, it’s become the soundtrack to our community’s most joyful celebrations.

It’s easy to see why the Vengaboys have such a lasting appeal within the LGBTIQA+ community. Their music defies the seriousness of everyday life, encouraging fans to embrace their fabulous selves, be playful, and always opt for glitter over gray.

Their legacy is one of inclusion and love — core values of queer culture — and this connection has only deepened over time.

A Journey Through Time: Vengaboys in Pop Culture

Since bursting onto the scene in the late 90s, the Vengaboys have had their fair share of ups and downs. After a meteoric rise to fame with hits like “Boom, Boom, Boom, Boom!!,” they took a brief hiatus in the early 2000s.

Thankfully, they returned to the stage in the late 2000s, continuing to share their joyful tunes with loyal fans across the globe.

One of their most significant cultural milestones in recent years was their 2019 performance at Sydney’s Mardi Gras after-party. For many, it was a dream come true to see the legendary group at such an iconic event, solidifying their status as queer culture icons. It’s no surprise that their music, full of catchy hooks and danceable beats, aligns perfectly with the flamboyant spirit of Mardi Gras.

The crowd’s reaction? Absolute adoration. It’s moments like these that demonstrate just how much the Vengaboys mean to their queer fanbase.

What to Expect from the 2025 “90s Mania” Tour

Fast forward to 2025, and the Vengaboys are preparing to dazzle us once again with their signature blend of vibrant energy and infectious tunes. This time around, they’re bringing an extra layer of excitement by sharing the stage with other Eurodance legends. The 90s Mania tour will feature an electrifying lineup, including DJ Sash!, Livin’ Joy, and Alex Party — making this a truly epic celebration of 90s dance anthems.

• DJ Sash! is known for iconic hits like “Encore Une Fois” and “Ecuador,” setting the dance floors alight in the 90s and early 2000s. His music has always been a favorite at queer nightclubs, and his inclusion in this lineuppromises a nostalgic dance frenzy.

• Livin’ Joy, the Italian dance group behind the timeless hit “Dreamer,” will be bringing their powerhouse vocals and uplifting beats. If you’ve ever danced to “Dreamer” in a gay bar or club, you know the sheer euphoria it brings. Get ready to relive that!

• Alex Party, the Eurodance project responsible for unforgettable tracks like “Don’t Give Me Your Life,” will be rounding out the lineup. Their catchy beats and high-energy performance style will make this a night of non-stop dancing and feel-good vibes.

Expect all the classics from the Vengaboys — from “Boom, Boom, Boom, Boom!!” to “We Like to Party” — but don’t be surprised if they throw in a few surprises too. They’ve been known to remix their own tracks and keep things fresh for the modern audience.

So, dust off your party shoes, Australia — the 90s Mania tour, featuring the Vengaboys, DJ Sash!, Livin’ Joy, and Alex Party, is coming, and this is one event you won’t want to miss. Grab your tickets, gather your crew, and get ready for a night of pure, unadulterated fun.

Whether you’re a lifelong fan or new to the Vengaboys phenomenon, this is one event that promises to be as fabulous as it is unforgettable.

-Tickets go on sale to the General Public on November 7 but Frontier Members can access Pre-Sale tickets from today. Find them on Ticketek here.

For the latest LGBTIQA+ Sister Girl and Brother Boy news, entertainment, community stories in Australia, visit qnews.com.au. Check out our latest magazines or find us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.

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computerguideworld-blog · 6 years ago

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Dirty Computer: Janelle Monaes Electrifying Coming Out Party

New Post has been published on https://computerguideto.com/must-see/dirty-computer-janelle-monaes-electrifying-coming-out-party/

Dirty Computer: Janelle Monaes Electrifying Coming Out Party

Janelle Mones new album Dirty Computer features the acclaimed singer-songwriter at her most revealing and freewheeling.

It sounds like an anthem for youthful brazenness and epic summer nights; it also sounds like a spiritual manifesto.

This is a fucking fun album.

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And it sounds like shes having a blast.

Read more: https://www.thedailybeast.com

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