Album Review: American Band – Drive-By Truckers


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Art doesn’t always make sense. Sometimes it hovers above you, resting in some foreign astral plane that you can’t wrap your head around. Sometimes its ambition exceeds its grasp and the concept ends up merely a lost idea among the fiery wreckage. And sometimes it doesn’t make sense because it is so completely disjointed, alternating between excellence and rubbish, that the work as a whole hardly seems possible to have been created by the same artist. Continue reading Album Review: American Band – Drive-By Truckers

Album Review: Atrocity Exhibition – Danny Brown

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When Outkast released Aquemini in 1998, they announced to the world that rap was every bit as musically rich and freely weird as any other genre. That album created a blueprint that was only followed by a small number of artists after them. There has been a small handful of significant albums that could claim to be the artistic descendants of AqueminiBlazing Arrow by Blackalicious, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy by Kanye West, and To Pimp A Butterfly by Kendrick Lamar – and after today’s surprise release of Atrocity Exhibition by Danny Brown, there is a new album to add to that list. Continue reading Album Review: Atrocity Exhibition – Danny Brown

Album Review: Sunlit Youth – Local Natives

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Think about a U2 album. Which album did you think about? We may have all mentally selected different albums but we all heard the exact same sound in our heads. U2 has crystallized a set of sonic qualities, which are uniquely theirs, that may be flavoured with different spices from album to album but are all unmistakably part of the U2 recipe. In this same fashion, Local Natives has created a sound of their own and on their new album, Sunlit Youth, they again play true to form while adding in new elements not present before. Continue reading Album Review: Sunlit Youth – Local Natives

Book Review: Hot Sauce Nation by Denver Nicks

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I used to be a reader. In home school there was little else to do. By the time I started public school in 8th grade, I had read everything I would be assigned to read through senior year AP English, with the exception of The Handmaid’s Tale. After high school, I became so engrossed in playing/listening to/seeing music that books were largely a thing of the past. I can sum up the books I have read, post-2001, in a few simple categories: music biographies, books about dragons, clever books by fashionably eccentric hit-or-miss authors (Palahniuk/Vonnegut/BEE), and books by Denver Nicks. I knew Denver from college and he introduced me to Fugazi via a decently played riff on his acoustic guitar, so any time he writes a book, I make a point to read it. Continue reading Book Review: Hot Sauce Nation by Denver Nicks