‘Since I Left You’ is both epistemically opaque and emotionally intimate.
Category: revisited review
Lead Belly lived a blues fantasy: a murderous outlaw in and out of incarceration singing prison songs in front of guards and convicts alike.
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exuma – exuma (1970)
This is a spiritual odyssey steeped in Bahamian tradition.
“‘The Tyranny of Distance’ forgoes a weaponised awkwardness common to East Coast indie rock”.
Jungle Brothers’ ‘Straight Out The Jungle’ is a benchmark of Afrocentrism that pioneered jazzy self-assurance, a fun embrace of club culture, and spiritually conscious rhymes.
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slint – spiderland (1991)
The opening licks on ‘Breadcrumb Trail’ do not imply the sprawling jam of ‘Spiderland,’ nor do they show any signs of its nocturnal ambience. This record flooded from the basement of a band not doing as well as they could, while playing with a pointed creative privilege. The introspection means that they cannot flail outwardly. […]
Clarice Lispector’s 1973 work ‘Agua Viva’ is written in the syllabic flow of a perfect novel, but expressed through streaming narratives and hellishly opaque metaphor. An outline. I think Bob Dylan had the same idea on ‘Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’ – to write passively with lyrical latitude and have faith that between alien […]
Six months after his only commercially successful concert, Schubert died of an illness that history has since crosshatched as syphilis and/or typhoid fever. Despite the elemental desolation of Winterreise, it is ecstatic in movement—dropping low and leaping in a daze to touch the sun. The strict, often slow, tempo jousts with liquidus emotions that would […]
We expend a lot of energy trying not to be irritable, so when anger rises it rouses the question of whether to silence it or push forward. That, of course, depends on stimuli. For 7 Year Bitch, the stimulus was the death of their guitarist, Stefanie Sargent, and the brutal murder of their friend, The […]
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