Here’s a list of major new releases for the week of August 18, 2017. Please feel free to request reviews for any of the following albums from staff or contributors. As our staff post reviews of these albums, links will appear below the art work so that you can read about the release, see how we scored it, and more.
–Featured Release: Steven Wilson – “To The Bone”–
Genre: Progressive Rock/Experimental/Psychedelic // Label: Caroline International
Background:
Steven Wilson is among the most consistent artists and producers in the progressive rock scene. Having worked with Opeth extensively, and not to mention spearheading his own successful outfit in Porcupine Tree, Wilson’s most impressive feats may have actually come on the solo front. To The Bone marks his fifth full-length solo LP, coming on the heels of 2015’s Hand. Cannot. Erase and 2013’s The Raven That Refused to Sing (And Other Stories). To The Bone is, thematically, a grave look at modern times – however, it is also a nod to the musical influences of his youth. Regarding To The Bone, Wilson has gone on record stating: “My fifth record is in many ways inspired by the hugely ambitious progressive pop records that I loved in my youth…I grew up listening to a lot of very smart pop records by artists like Kate Bush, Talk Talk, Peter Gabriel, Prince, Depeche Mode, Tears for Fears, The The…It struck me that there aren’t too many albums made like that these…
It’s not like we needed any additional reasons to crown Ella as the queen of pop. At just 20 years old, she’s stolen that crown from Ariana who stole it from Carle Rae who stole it from Taylor. Well, that’s if you ask me.
But personal and irrelevant opinions aside about who owns pop (when it’s really the record companies and producers), Melodrama was – and is – a stone cold classic. If you try and find a poorly constructed or unimaginative tune on it, you can’t. It’s art-pop at it’s best, and it is everything that the industry should be striving for.
…And then there’s moments like this that go even further above and beyond what you’d expect. Lorde must already be bored getting showered with accolades, because she has gone to work creating six incredible live re-imaginings of some of Melodrama‘s best songs: “Hard Feelings/Loveless” (see above), “Writer In The Dark”, “Sober”, “Supercut”, “Homemade Dynamite”, and “The Louvre.” The above is one of my early favorites – there’s just something about the way she gets down to her own music that is both adorable and admirable. You can tell she loves what she does.
In a brief interview with Vevo, Lorde states,
I don’t really do, like, acoustic sessions or anything, but with this record, it had roots in acoustic instruments and live musicianship.”
She also discusses working with Jack Antenoff (of Bleachers) and how the record centered…
Public Enemy… what can be said about them that shouldn’t already be known? They’re one of the most influential Hip Hop artists of the 80’s and early 90’s, due in large part to being one of the first Hip Hop groups to really focus on politics, and the plight of African Americans in general. Their lyrics were often controversial, and through it all the group remained unapologetic. If it wasn’t for them there probably wouldn’t be a lot of the politically charged music that exists today, from modern Hip Hop artists to metal bands such as System of a Down and Rage Against the Machine. Public Enemy’s first four albums are all widely regarded as classics, but there has been some discussion about which one is really the defining PE album, in my opinion the answer is easy; Apocalypse 91 is PE’s definitive album.
Another reason that this album is such a classic is due to one of the most capable Hip Hop production teams in the Bomb Squad, and an equally capable DJ in Terminator X. Apocalypse 91 features some of the most dense and innovative music that I’ve ever heard in any genre. The beats are complex by Hip Hop standards, and the music includes a large number of samples, sounds and influences all layered over each other in such a way that even sixteen years later I can still pick up new sounds. The Bomb Squad would take things such as screams (By the Time I…
Anyone on this site is, by now, well aware of my affinity for melodically-inclined music. There’s just something effortless and uplifting about songs that don’t require you to completely submerge yourself within them – and dedicate considerable time and emotional resources to – in order to understand. That isn’t to say that I haven’t spent tons of time getting lost in music with real, gritty depth and meaning, but lately the line between the genres I’d expect to pack that punch and those that I’ve traditionally viewed as reprehensibly artificial have actually begun to blur. From my perspective it feels like pop music is getting better, but that’s pretty clearly a hypersensationalized hot-take based on the opinion of someone who has ignored quality pop music for the better part of his life. As recently as three years ago I recall scoffing at the genre, aligning myself to a more elite standard as I’d quickly turn off the car radio to plug my ipod in and get lost in the music of The Antlers or The National. The reality, of course, is that quality pop music has always been there…I’ve just been isolating myself from it out of a fear of being subjected to the worst that the genre has to offer. But that’s no way to critique music, because by the same standards I ought to be repulsed by indie-folk considering the remarkable attention that bands such as Mumford and Sons and The Lumineers attract.
Or maybe I’m just getting old and my music taste has regressed to…
Hello users, and welcome to a blogpost detailing a tool to help you rig the sputnik ratings in your favor. Probably a third of users’ comments are related to how much they dislike the average rating of albums (verified fact, obviously). Some albums’ average rating is too high, too low, there are not enough 5’s, 1’s, or the count of ratings is low. Your favorite album may have missed the year end chart; meanwhile, that album that you (and, really, only you) hated was near the top.
Numbers are often used to set incentives in our modern/global/capitalistic society. We gain admission or don’t to the colleges we want to go to based on our test scores and grades, we get fired or retain our jobs based on benchmarks set by our bosses, and we make $10’s of millions or more by breaking the home run record (and a few seasons later follow that up with 120+ intentional walks). But numbers used for evaluation are, generally speaking, adjacent to what they intend to measure. It’s not exactly the case that getting a good grade is the same as usefully retaining course material or that closing a lot of sales indicates one is worthy of employment. (But yes, if you hit 73 homers, you are good at baseball).
“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” (Goodhart’s Law). Sometimes, when it suits us, we humans tend to manipulate a measure for our own gain –…
Hello everybody, and welcome to the 2017 charts… sort of. So, I scraped together every album listed in the genre pages of the 2017 charts on August 10, 2017, and calculated the average of the ratings, user usage weighted averages, and their rankings. The user usage weighted averages are described here (idea for the algorithm here); they are weighted averages of the ratings with users with more sputnik comments/ratings/lists/reviews getting more weight in the ratings and an adjustment to them is made so that the count of ratings increases/decreases the ranking of an album (the lower 95% credible interval value, if two albums have an equivalent average rating, the one with the higher count of ratings is ranked higher). Only albums with 20 or more ratings were included and the top 200 albums are below.
(I updated the rankings to now include the users with the most weight, top 5 users are listed in order of most weight and the number in percent next to each user is the share of the vote they have in the UserUsageMean. For context, divide 1 to the number of ratings of each album, and that’s the weight you had before. For Converge, for instance, by voting you would have ~0.45% of the vote, but, our-boy The Ageless Wonder Rob Lowe, has ~6 times more weight than he had before. That’s LITERALLLY, very cool.)
Here’s a list of major new releases for the week of August 11, 2017. Please feel free to request reviews for any of the following albums from staff or contributors. As our staff post reviews of these albums, links will appear below the art work so that you can read about the release, see how we scored it, and more.
– Full List of Releases: August 11, 2017 –
5 Billion In Diamonds: 5 Billion In Diamonds
Genre: Alternative Rock // Label: 100% Records
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Amy O: Elastic
Genre: Alternative Rock // Label: Winspear
Here’s a list of major new releases for the week of August 4, 2017. Please feel free to request reviews for any of the following albums from staff or contributors. As our staff post reviews of these albums, links will appear below the art work so that you can read about the release, see how we scored it, and more.
– Full List of Releases: August 4, 2017 –
Accept: The Rise Of Chaos
Genre: Heavy Metal/Hard Rock // Label: Nuclear Blast
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Brett Eldredge: Brett Eldredge
Genre: Country // Label: Atlantic Nashville
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Briana Marela: Call It Love
Genre: Indie/Dream Pop // Label: Jagjaguwar
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Dale Crover: The Fickle Finger Of Fate
Genre: Indie-Pop/Alt-Rock // Label: Joyful Noise Recordings
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Dan Wilson: Re-Covered
Genre: Alt-Rock // Label: Ballroom Music / Big Deal Media
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Dead Cross: Dead Cross
Genre: Punk/Thrash Metal/Hardcore // Label: Ipecac Recordings
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Def Leppard: Hysteria (30th Anniversary Edition, Remastered 2017)
Genre: Hard Rock // Label: Mercury
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Marty Friedman: Wall Of Sound
Genre: Metal/New Age // Label: Prosthetic
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Mystery Skulls: One Of Us
Genre: Indie-Pop/Pop-Rock/Electronic // Label:…
To commemorate the 30th anniversary of Def Leppard’s break out release Hysteria, and to try to bring back “Throwback Thursday” here is ‘Gods of War’ — easily the best song on the album. Purchase the 30th anniversary release of Hysteriahere. Hysteria releases 4 August 2017 through Mercury Records.
I truly had a nicer intro written up, but the servers died, so let’s take you live to check in on how they’re sounding today:
Despite the internal strife heard above, we’re happy to bring you 22 selections of tunes that might have tickled our collective fancies this quarter, with some tracks being wonderfully complemented by some rather entertaining blurbs along the way. As you will see, not everybody could make it this time out (thanks, servers), so if we missed something, you’re certainly welcome to let us know in the comments.
Cheers, and Happy Independence Day/Treason Day to all you Americans. See you in September for Q3 if our site doesn’t eat itself!
What So Not – “Divide & Conquer” (Noisia Remix) Divide & Conquer (Remixes) Listen if you like: Spor, SHADES, Ivy Lab, Mefjus
This song is bananas. You know those brain-dead YouTube comments on every mediocre dubstep or neurofunk drum & bass song, things like, “oi this song’s so bonkers I fucked me girlfriend without a rubber”? This is so nuts I’m almost tempted to make one of those comments. The half-time drop is an underappreciated resource in drum & bass – though it’s thankfully seen more use with the rise of SHADES’ and Ivy Lab’s hip-hop-leaning uptempo stuff – and a properly tuned one can ignite a room. This Noisia remix does just that: corrosive distortion, offbeat drum fills, and a snare the size of Mars fuse…
Here’s a list of major new releases for the week of July 28, 2017. Please feel free to request reviews for any of the following albums from staff or contributors. As our staff post reviews of these albums, links will appear below the art work so that you can read about the release, see how we scored it, and more.
–Featured Release: Manchester Orchestra – “A Black Mile to the Surface”–
Genre: Indie-Rock // Label: Loma Vista
Following Cope, a straightforward rock album with few tricks up its sleeve, Manchester Orchestra headed back to the drawing board for their fifth LP A Black Mile to the Surface. It feels like the logical successor to Simple Math, soaring atop orchestral strings and dramatic song structures. Purely in terms of rock n’ roll grit, it is easily the farthest the band has ever sounded from Mean Everything To Nothing, but for what it lacks in aggression it more than makes up for in effortless songwriting, immaculate flow, and lyrical aptitude. It feels like the emotional weight of I’m Like a Virgin Losing a Child expressed through the glossy filter of Simple Math‘s production – a prospect that should have a fan of either record salivating in anticipation. Just when it seemed like Manchester Orchestra’s best days might be behind them, they’ve proven themselves to be one of those rare indie-rock mainstays. With a record that sounds comfortingly at home for the band, yet totally unlike anything they’ve crafted thus…
Hello comrades, and welcome to sputnikmusic, the music vertical for the Russian propaganda news site sputniknews.com. Today we will cover a long lost feature of sputnik, musical neighbors. First, anybody that visits this site loves music. Sometimes users come onto this site and celebrate their favorite artists and the albums of theirs that they love. Sometimes they come to trash someone else’s favorite artists and albums but also because they love music. It takes a special love to spend one’s time and mental effort listening to music they know they won’t like, and a special love to come up with a long string of sick one-liner put-downs. We share this love with each other, as fellow chum, in all its forms; but it is true that our love of music can align more strongly with an exclusive subset of individual users: our musical neighbors.
From the list on this topic that I did a while ago, I gather that musical neighbors was a fun, well-regarded feature of the site, even though no one knew what the hell it was or how the hell it worked. (I recall being told that almost everybody was connected to one particular user.) It’s obvious why it was so popular; it’s because it made us feel connected to others and feel bigger than ourselves. It made us feel connected to the whole of sputnikmusic, the music vertical for the Russian propaganda news site sputniknews.com. With this post, I will return that shared love back…
MarsKid just kinda popped in my head. I thought something like UranusBoy might be a bit sketchy –MarsKid, 7/23/2017
Greetings fellow users! As some of you are aware, I’ve started a little user review competition in which the winner receives an automatic feature, as well as a “user spotlight” session. It basically consists of an informal chat in which I ask some personal questions as well as some silly ones. This week’s winner was MarsKid, who reviewed Bloodclot’s “Up In Arms”. Without further ado, please read on below as I sat down with him to discuss everything from zakalwe to Linkin Park.
I’ll start you off with an easy one: Would you rather spend the rest of your life as Ed Sheeran’s sound-checker (and you’re forced to be present to the end of every concert as well), or a stage dancer for Meghan Trainor?
Oh shit, this gets deeper than I thought.
I feel like being a stage dancer would honestly be a pretty nice gig. Get to shake it off in front of big crowds. Bitches like the male dancers. Having to stick to Ed Sheeran like glue would probably be like having to babysit Futures for a lifetime, so I’ll definitely pass.
Maybe I could teach him math operations though, that’d be fun.
Dancer takes the cake tho
Sound logic that I honestly can’t argue with. But let’s step back from those two hells for one second to talk about you. It’s…
Thousands upon thousands of albums, EPs, mixtapes, compilations, and songs are released weekly. You might not be aware of the existence of 99% of those releases, but they’re there. So when each song released to the public is simply a drop in a pool that dwarfs even the Pacific Ocean, it can be hard to navigate the current music scene: it’s always moving and impossible to keep up with its speed. That’s where Share Some Singles comes into the picture. This series was formed to highlight songs released in 2017 that might not have been discovered by other listeners otherwise. I, alongside other Sputnikmusic users, have pulled together dozens of singles released in the recent past that we felt needed to be heard by the world. Or at least the Sputnik reader base.
Artists are listed in alphabetical order with corresponding YouTube, Soundcloud, and/or Bandcamp links. A Spotify playlist is also embedded below if the singles are available through that service. Enjoy! –wtferrothorn
ABRONCA – “Chegando De Assalto”
When thinking about abrasive and aggressive hip-hop, one usually imagines some ’90s gangstas, innit? Well, there is a trio of Brazilian ladies that would like to flip you off first, but then also convince you they are just as capable of delivering raw, in your face hip-hop harshness. –UniqueUniverse
Here’s a list of major new releases for the week of July 21, 2017. Please feel free to request reviews for any of the following albums from staff or contributors. As our staff post reviews of these albums, links will appear below the art work so that you can read about the release, see how we scored it, and more.
–Featured Release: Lana Del Rey – “Lust For Life”–
Genre: Indie-Pop // Label: Interscope
Background:
Lana Del Rey’s career got off to a blazing hot start with Born To Die, and despite the subsequent cool off, she’s still a household name in indie-pop. Ultraviolence was a sultry, dreamlike follow-up that ultimately proved worthwhile, but Honeymoon drew considerably less appeal from fans and critics alike. Her style hasn’t changed much across the board, which might begin to explain the diminishing return. With Lust For Life, she vies to recapture some of that initial luster. For a taste of what is to come, check out her collaboration with The Weeknd below.
![Dead Cross [Explicit]](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/61MgcxD4QGL._SS500.jpg)
![Hysteria [3 CD][30th Anniversary Edition]](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51Lo1e5vzqL.jpg)
![One of Us [Explicit]](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41G31dOeAGL._SS500.jpg)
![Lust For Life [Explicit]](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51a3mjf6j2L._SS500.jpg)
