Photo Credit: Eliot Lee Hazel “Almost makes me wanna cry // The weather’s so beautiful outside,” cries Beth Orton on the title track, and lead single, for her newest album, Weather Alive. It’s a sentiment that echoes across the LP’s 45 minutes – how small moments of beauty can evoke such heightened emotional responses. The… Read more
Photo Credit: Sarah Doyle Badged “Irish alt-country,” this might turn you off. That would be a mistake. CMAT’s hilarious debut is one of 2022’s most remarkable achievements. 26-year-old Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson describes herself as a mix between Dolly Parton, Katy Perry, and Weird “Al” Yankovic. If that sounds like an unbelievable fusion, nothing could be… Read more
Photo Credit: Daniel Sannwald “Una mariposa, yo me transformo…Me contradigo, yo me transformo // Soy to’a’ la’ cosa’, yo me transforma,” sings Rosalía on the opener, “Saoko” to her third studio LP Motomami. In English, the lyrics translate to “Like a butterfly, I transform… I contradict myself, I transform // I’m everything, I transform.” It’s… Read more
Photo Credit: Roberto Ricciuti/Redferns Following up on an album like Sometimes I Might Be Introvert is an unenviable task by anyone’s standard. Little Simz Mercury Prize-winning fourth album was an orchestral, genre-mashing masterpiece filled with expert story-telling – upon release, it was widely compared to the likes of Lauryn Hill’s Miseducation and Kendrick Lamar’s To… Read more
Photo Credit: Mary Ellen Matthews The run-up to SZA’s sophomore effort SOS has been long, unpredictable, and reliably confounding. Its lead single – and SZA’s first solo top-ten hit – “Good Days” arrived almost two years before the rest of the album and wouldn’t enjoy an official music video until March 2021, by which time… Read more
Constantly changing throughout the year, my Album of the Year list – which I always enjoy making – this year constitutes Irish Weird Al Yankovic-inspired country pop, moist body parts, teenage Sonic Youth apprentices, weaponized troglodytes, crashing metaphoric airplanes, strong, colorful, Canadian beverages, and for the first time since 2018 – no hip-hop albums. Below… Read more
Photo Credit: Richard Beland Since their debut in 1996, or at least certainly since their multi-platinum 2001 breakthrough Silver Side Up, Nickelback has generally been perceived as an unfortunate by-product of the early ’90s Seattle grunge sound. However, on their tenth album Get Rollin’, Nickelback seems to have more common with the dominating rock genre… Read more
2022 saw no shortage of fantastic music, which is perhaps why there’s so much disagreement as to what the year’s big, standout releases were. With this list, I attempt to break through the noise and put aside any personal biases to objectively assess the most important releases from this year. #10. Alvvays – ‘Blue Rev’… Read more
Photo Credit: Johannes Lovund EDM, perhaps more than any other genre, defined the commercial music of the 2010s. When you think about the biggest, most inescapable hits of the decade, you realize a majority of them belong to this genre – the late Avicii’s “Wake Me Up,” Major Lazer, DJ Snake, and MØ’s “Lean On”… Read more
Photo Credit: Zachary Spangler The debut album of supergroup L.S. Dunes was always going to be met with impossible-to-fulfill expectations – how could a collaboration between the Circa Survive lead singer Anthony Green and My Chemical Romance guitarist Frank Iero among others not? This sense of high expectations, and an eagerness to fulfill them, come… Read more