Category: Music
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Loveless
There are plenty of ways to build tension in music. Dissonance, unresolved harmonies, repetition, and crescendo have been skillfully deployed over the many years that music has been written. The response to the build up is more challenging. Many fall into the same harmonic traps, and many more fail to place anything worth remembering in…
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You’re Living All Over Me
The first twenty-five seconds of Dinosaur Jr.’s second album are furious. A drum fill announces the alien, soaring guita,r and three wails (courtesy of Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo), before this cerebral beauty concedes to an excellent indie rock song. Evident from this moment and later experiment Poledo, Dino Jr. could’ve made an incredible and unique…
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Songs the Lord Taught Us
Songs the Lord Taught Us is a defining album of a minor genre. The sound of ‘psychobilly’ is an anachronism, evolved music in a world where madness is fitness. Aiming both to reintroduce the energy of rockabilly music to an audience the old stuff had gone stale to and wed it to punk and B-horror…
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Psychocandy
Noise pop is alternative pop at its purest. The Velvet Underground’s mixture of rock songs and avant garde sound experiments continues to be the most important choice in laying the foundations for alternative pop music’s path over the following decades. By the time two brothers known as The Jesus and Mary Chain released Psychocandy in…
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Bee Thousand
Music criticism and the communities that surround it often have an impermeable character read into them, and not without reason. Complaints about mixing, mastering, or any audio quality specifics are especially formidable, incomprehensible, and even pretentious to outsiders and insiders alike. The merit to these claims is almost always found in the music if given…
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Bad Moon Rising
The no wave scene in 80s New York did not owe a lot to southern rock or roots rock of any kind, even punk was growing too close to conformity for them, yet Sonic Youth decided to nab the name of a Creedence Clearwater Revival tune for their 1985 sophomore album, ‘Bad Moon Rising’. The…
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Fun House
Looking back at the rock and roll of the 1960’s, it can be difficult to understand the fear of rock music as a tool for social collapse without placing myself in a mindset that seems ridiculous. But the Stooge’s second album, Fun House , released just after the end of the decade that solidified rock as…
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Windowlicker
Aphex Twin’s Windowlicker is all about juxtaposition, immediately letting this on with its cover featuring a bikini model on a bright blue background with Aphex Twin’s (Richard D. James) own face superimposed on top of the girl’s, smiling wide and staring into the camera. This same effect is used in the music video, directed by Chris Cunningham,…