100 words music reviews
Gaelle had a lot on her mind in 2004, or maybe it was one omnipresent thought. Either way, one hundred words might be too few to list the genres she brandished on her sole full-length release. Gaelle’s stunning house shines through padded kicks, nocturnal moods, and, later on, longing piano licks. The R&B and neo-soul […]
The question upon each Beyonce release is: what will she do differently? 2016’s brilliant ‘Lemonade’ posited, with its varied feature list, that a ‘genre’ is simply where you choose to stand in the one-room party of music. The attitude of six years ago has run down to 2022 like a choppy river. ‘RENAISSANCE’ is expectedly […]
A pop artist exploring beyond their sound and weaving through expectation is a good set up. Just this year, an emboldened ROSALÍA gave us the brilliant ‘MOTAMAMI’. The trouble with ‘Honestly, Nevermind’, is that it is not experimental to anyone but Drake himself. The beats pass by like an artificial water park river, occasionally pumping […]
‘Escapism’ takes on a more complete sound than 2020’s fantastic ‘Afterimages’, adopting a lo-fi backbone and adding some gentle soul. The road Pepe. goes down here is relatively unassailable, as he breezes through clean hip-hop beats and Tom Misch-esque guitars that, similar to the Englishman, go beyond the pleasant and towards the anodyne. Nonetheless, ‘Escapism’’s […]
‘Super Discount’ has slipped into cult status while the lush, hook-heavy ‘French touch’ attained commercial enormity through ‘Homework’ (Daft Punk, 1997) and ‘Moon Safari’ (Air, 1998). As a whole, this quasi-compilation lies somewhere between the two, anticipating the experimentalism of the former and the mellow expression of the latter. The record was originally intended as […]
There’s a naivety to the 90s for anyone who grew up in the following decade: a feeling that the hope of technological betterment and Blair-induced promise was somehow misplaced. If anything resembles respite from a wildly changing tomorrow, it is the club music of the time. This compilation ranges from beat-less groundwork, to pumping, adrenaline-fuelled […]
Axel Boman’s ‘LUZ’ is an album with a strong grasp of what it means to be playful in the house genre while retaining a fidelity and accessibility. Everything becomes an experimentation between these walls: energetic, kinetic, and vibrating shapes of sound bounce between them. Boman pushes and compresses these sound-shapes into an enclosed and tight […]
‘Vocalcity’ is the sound of a glistening party at the turn of the millennium. This iconic record churned an emotional evolution in house music which emphasised laconic, but passionate narratives over precise electronic components. It said what Sugababes, Spice Girls, or Atomic Kitten used to, but palmed listeners off with frost rather than inviting them […]
100 words music reviews 