Here’s a list of major new releases for the week of March 4, 2016. Please feel free to request reviews for any of the following albums from staff or contributors. In addition, you may notice more “track of the day” posts on this site, a feature that we hope to maintain with some level of consistency in the future. If you have a track you would like to see covered, let us know in the comments below.
Atrament – Eternal Downfall (Argento Records)
Baklava – Dane On (Grimoire Records)
The Big Pink – Empire Underground (B3SCI Records)
Big Ups – Before a Million Universes (Exploding In Sound Records)
Casket Robbery – Evolution of Evil (Mortal Music) Circle of Dust – Circle of Dust [Remastered] (FiXT) — Trey Spencer
Coppersky – If We’re Losing Everything (Uncle M Music)
The Coral – Distance Inbetween (Ignition Records Ltd)
Cub Sport – This Is Our Vice (Nettwek Productions Ltd)
Dead Procession – Rituais e Mantras do Medo (Labyrinth Productions)
Dead Stars – Bright Colors (Weird Tree Records)
Esperanza Spalding – Emily’s D+Evolution (Concord Music Group Inc)
Face to Face – Protection (Fat Wreck Cords)
Gadget – The Great Destroyer (Relapse Records Inc)
Guerilla Toss – Eraser Stargazer (DFA LLC)
Heel – The Parts We Save (No Label)
Hero The Band – Bleach (Nova Love Records) Inverloch – Distance Collapsed (Relapse Records…
It’s the year 2016, and everyone knows of M83. With their breakthrough record having come in 2008 with Saturdays=Youth, it has seemingly been nothing but constant ascension for this bunch, culminating in the massive double record Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming. For the first time since 2011, we’re faced with an upcoming full-length album from the indie/electronic stars entitled Junk. Even though the album art is the stuff nightmares are made of, the lead single off the LP, “Do It, Try It”, is confirmation that Junk will be anything but. Exploding with sonic energy, the track bubbles with upbeat pianos/keyboards, soars atop massive synths, and features one of the most irresistible hooks of the year so far. Sure it’s weird, and it’s not the same M83 that gave us chills on “Wait”, but it’s fun – and a welcome change even if it ends up being a one time indulgence. For a band that seems limitless in their capabilities, why not splash a little color on the walls?
Here’s a list of major new releases for the week of February 26, 2016. Please feel free to request reviews for any of the following albums from staff or contributors.
Anthrax – For All Kings (Megaforce Records) — Trey Spencer
Anvil – Anvil Is Anvil(Steamhammer)
Black Cobra – Imperium Simulacra(Season of Mist)
Bombus – Repeat Until Death(Century Media Records Ltd)
Bonnie Raitt – Dig In Deep (Redwing Records)
Centerfold – MOTHXR (Washington Square Music)
Colours – Ivory (Victory Records)
Conny Ochs – Future Fables (Exile On Mainstream Records)
Death Index – Death Index (Deathwish Inc)
Deathless Legacy – The Gathering (Scarlet Records)
Devotion – Words and Crystals (Pavement Entertainment)
Divine Realm – Tectum Argenti (Divine Realm)
DMA’s – Hill’s End (Mom + Pop)
Droids Attack – Sci-Fi or Die (Riff Reaper Records)
Entombed A.D. – Dead Dawn (Versity Rights)
Folteraar – Vertellingen van een donkere eeuw (Iron Bonehead Productions)
Frokedal – Hold on Dreamer (Propeller Recordings)
From Ashes to New – Day One (Better Noise Records) Fuzzy Vox – No Landing Plan (Self-Released) — Raul Stanciu
Ghost Horizon – Astral Possession (Ghost Horizon)
Greenleaf – Rise Above The Meadow (Napalm Records Handels GmbH)
Headspace – All That You Fear is Gone (Inside Out Music)
High Priest of Saturn – Son of Earth and Sky (Svart Records)
Holy Esque – At Hope’s Ravine (Beyond The Frequency)
Hopelezz – Sent to Destroy (Sonicscars Records)
IDestroy – Vanity Loves Me (IDestroy) …
Here’s a list of major new releases for the week of February 19, 2016. Please feel free to request reviews for any of the following albums from staff or contributors. Speaking of which, we would like to welcome our newest staff members and contributors on board! If you have not already heard, JohnnyOnTheSpot, Atari, and Jacquibim have joined our staff writing team, while TalonsOfFire, TheSpirit, GameOfMetal, DoofusWainwright, and Beachdude are settling into their new found roles as contributing reviewers. Congratulations on a job well done and we’re looking forward to what you will bring to the site in the future!
We also encourage all of our readers to check out last week’s interview between We Lost The Sea’s Matt Harvey and our very own Magnus Altkula. It’s a superbly executed piece, both by Magnus and by Matt. Without further ado, though, here is this week’s lineup:
Adept – Sleepless (Napalm Records)
After the Burial – Dig Deep (Sumerian Records)
Animal Collective – Painting With (Domino Recording Co) Antigone and Francois X – We Move As One (Dement3d) — Tristan Jones
Bentcousin – Bentcousin (Team Love Records)
Choir of Young Believers – Grasque (Ghostly International) Deep Sea Diver – Secrets (High Beam) — Irving Tan Delain – Lunar Prelude (Napalm Records) — Trey Spencer
Dinamo Azari – Estranged…
Here’s a list of major new releases for the week of February 12, 2016. Please feel free to request reviews for any of the following albums from staff or contributors.
Adam Strangler – Ideas of Order (No Label/Independent)
AntropomorphiA – Necromantic Love Songs (Metal Blade Records)
Basia Bulat – Good Advice (Secret City Records Inc.)
Betty Black – Valley Low (KID Recordings LLC)
Black Wizard – New Waste (Listenable Records)
Daniel Ash – Stripped (Main Man Records)
The Erkonauts – I Did Something Bad (Kaotoxin)
Exec – The Limber Real (Tambourhinoceros)
Flummox – Selcouth (Tridroid Records)
For Sore Eyes – Nexus (Sliptrick Records)
The Frights – You Are Going To Hate This (Dangerbird Records) Gehennah – Too Loud to Live, Too Drunk to Die (Metal Blade Records)
Holy Grail – Times of Pride and Peril (Prosthetic Records) The Jezabels – Synthia (No Label/Independent) – SowingSeason Kanye West – The Life of Pablo (Def Jam Recordings) – Will Robinson
James Supercave – Better Strange (Fairfax Entertainment Group)
Lady Low – And They Say Romance Is Dead (No Label/Independent)
Lissie – My Wild West (Lionboy Records)
Lobo – Alma (Signal Rex)
Lost Society – Braindead (Nuclear Blast Records)
Low Flying Hawks – Kofuku (Magnetic Eye Records)
Magrudergrind – II (Relapse Records Inc.)
Manipulate – Becoming Madness EP (Flatspot Records)
Me and My Drummer – Love Is a Fridge (Sinnbus)
Michel Anoia – Plethora (Allende Records) Motorpsycho – Here Be Monsters (Stickman Records) – Raul…
Here’s a list of major new releases for the week of February 5, 2016. Please feel free to request reviews for any of the following albums from staff or contributors.
Amoral – In Sequence (Imperial Cassette)
Beacon – Escapements (Ghostly International)
Breakbot – Still Waters (Ed Banger Records)
Burnt Palms – Back On My Wall (We Were Never Being Boring)
The Cult – Hidden City (Cooking Vinyl Limited)
Degradead – Degradead (Flying Dolphin Entertainment)
DIIV – Is The Is Are (Captured Tracks)
Divinity – The Immortalist Part 2. Momentum (No Label/Independent)
Dr. Dog – The Psychedelic Swamp (ANTI-)
Drowning Pool – Hellelujuah (Entertainment One Music)
Elton John – Wonderful Crazy Night (Island Records) EVOL – Future (Epic Records)
Field Music – Commontime (Memphis Industries)
Fleshgod Apocalypse – King (Nuclear Blast)
Foxes – All I Need (Epic Records)
Francis – Marathon (Popup Records)
Frostbite – Etching Obscurity (Tmina Records)
Hey Marseilles – Hey Marseilles (Shanachie Ent. Corp.)
Jagged Leaves – Nightmare Afternoon (CTD)
Junior Boys – Big Black Coat (City Slang)
KING – We Are KING (KING Creative)
Lucinda Williams – The Ghosts Of Highway 20 (Highway 20 Records)
Majid Jordan – Majid Jordan (Warner Bros./OVO Sound)
Moomin – A Minor Thought (Smallville)
Nonkeen – The Gamble (R&S Records)
Obscura – Akróasis (Relapse Records)
Ocerco – A Desolação (Signal Rex)
Odyssey – Voids(Bandcamp)
Orchid – Sign Of The Witch (Nuclear Blast)
Porches – Pool (Domino)
Product of Hate – Buried In Violence (Napalm Records)
Prong – X – No Absolutes…
From an editorial standpoint, the Year-End features are a lot of fun, despite the hectic scheduling and frenetic coordinating necessary to ensure we meet our [perpetually-malleable] deadlines. This is especially true for the Users’ Year-End list, which requires me to rely on the site’s contributing contingent to create the blurbs that complement each album in the feature. Not only are the Contributors tasked with all the writing, but there are occasions where they need to identify and recruit other users to alleviate the burden with similar energy and gusto.
Regardless of your opinion on the Users’ list – yes, we’ve heard plenty of you in regards to the Staff list – it takes an enthusiastic and reliable bunch to pull this off without a hitch. I’d wager that, all things considered, both features turned out rather well.
To say thank-you to the contributing reviewers for their hard work for the 2015 list, I’ve awarded them some additional, one-off “face time” on the blog. I left the theme open-ended and to each individual writer’s own devices. Where one might want to write about his favorite album this year, others might prefer instead to champion for an album that seemed to have gone under-appreciated or unrecognized on the site. Perhaps someone else wanted to write a treatise on why Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz is really 2015’s Album of the Year.
Please enjoy this 10-item featurette, and if you have other ideas that you’d enjoy contributing to or reading, don’t hesitate to keep in touch. –Jom
I don’t know about you, but I’ve always found late December/early January to be a dead zone for music. Aside from a few stray finds, it’s typically just a time for me to reflect upon the previous year, look at others’ year-end favorites, and see if I can augment my musical collection with their discoveries. That’s not a bad thing though, as the process often results in some of my most highly-rated records (see: The World is a Beautiful Place’s Harmlessness). So if that’s the route you’re used to taking, then I fully encourage you to continue. However, if you’re a little bored with 2015’s leftovers, it’s often fun to turn the page and peak ahead at what 2016 has in store.
Offering a glimpse into the future is nowhere near as good as what we already know rocked the socks off 2015. I suppose that it goes without saying that hindsight is 20/20, thus it is important not to hold this playlist to the same standard as a “year best” list. Plus, as much as I’d love to know every album that 2016 will bring us, the truth is that I typically play things pretty nonchalantly and just wait to see what comes my way as the months roll by. As a result, the below playlist is merely an appetizer sampler. You’ll probably like a few tracks and hate the rest, but that’s okay because the point is to just see what’s out there. Also, I was kind of limited to…
Love it or hate it, progressive metal is a tough genre to tackle because it takes true skill to balance technicality and emotion. At the same time, it’s another skill to make it sound completely engaging even when it’s nothing new. Even the genre’s most essential artists have trouble going about their music regarding this aspect. Intronaut accomplished this with flying colors due to their incredible musicianship and engaging vocals, both clean and harsh. In addition to this, this album’s melodies prove to be absolutely breathtaking. The band manage to tread familiar ground while consistently making things sound quite fresh in the process, which is quite admirable. It’s for these reasons that The Direction of Last Things exists as one of the best releases of the year. –Nick Mongiardo
It isn’t – and probably never will be – anyone’s favourite Titus album, but with the benefit of hindsight, 2012’s Local Business was a record that had to be made. Hell, the mere thought of topping The Monitor must have been daunting in itself, so it’s to their immense credit that Patrick Stickles and co. circumvented the…
I understand that this person means well in his/her own mind and is only going off personal experience or religious persuasion, but I personally dislike eulogies where the speaker asserts that “[So-and-so] is in a better place.” What makes the eulogizer think that the deceased wouldn’t rather be here with us if he could? Daniel Davis (known to most here as paradox1216) passed away this year after a long battle with cancer. Although we all paid our respects when we learned of the tragic news in October, my hope is that we can integrate his positive energy, enthusiasm, and musical curiosity into our own site presences. As problematic as this site can be on the back-end with technological headaches and other details that are completely outside of our control, Sputnikmusic is nevertheless a sanctuary, an interconnected respite for the weary, a place in which we can escape from “the real world” for a few minutes per day to engage colleagues and friends about our shared love of music in meaningful ways. You can…
It took me a long time to come around to Choose Your Weapon. Even as an avid fan of their debut, the follow-up is incomparably perplexing. Every time you start to wrap your head around the groove, tracks will spiral off in opposing directions — if you’ve ever heard a song that melds Afrobeat and chiptune as coherently as “Atari”, let me know. This steepens the entry curve somewhat, and means it may come across as flighty and directionless if not given the time of day (*cough* Fantano *cough*). However, those who delve deep and give it that time will find one of the most bizarrely enriching listening experiences of 2015.
Soul revivalists all too often pigeonhole themselves into a specific niche, but Hiatus Kaiyote make use of many strains of jazz, soul and funk from the last 50 years. You would think this smorgasbord of influences would cause the album to come across scatterbrained, but the band always somehow manage to rein it back in thanks to the enigmatic vocals of Nai Palm. Through every absurd twist in Weapon‘s wild ride, Palm is always there, adjusting to match the backdrop while providing some much needed grounding for listeners losing their way amongst the labyrinthine compositions. Have no doubt: it can be an exhausting and complex journey,…
Despite expanding his sound to fill a much broader scope, Kristian Matsson’s fourth full length shares a vital component with its predecessors: an unmistakable feeling of connection with the listener. Deemed his most personal work to date, Dark Bird is Home is affecting and passionate, but not without the lyrical genius of his past efforts. Fueled by topics like the death of a family member and the separation with his wife, Matsson conjures up a release that feels like an unashamed examination of life, rather than an exercise in self-pity. Make no mistake: the album is a grand adventure through life’s bleaker circumstances. Whether it be the horns that bounce around on “Slow Dance” or the gradual build-up in the title track, one can’t help but feel as though they’re part of the journey this time around. –Atari
Perhaps it is a bit surprising to see TesseracT’s Polaris on this list, mostly because of the number one complaint about it: the lack of real standout tracks. In some respects, this is understandable; however, what ultimately makes this album so great is its simplicity. It’s the uncomplicated instrumentation, the one-dimensional atmosphere, and…
Welcome back! It’s hard to believe that it’s already been a year since the highly acclaimed SMA’s (Sowing’s Music Awards) made its debut, and – to your certain delight – the feature has returned in 2015 to bring you the best of…well, whatever I say is best. I’m sure you are the most excited you’ve been all year long.
A typical reaction to the announcement that the SMA’s have returned.
Last year we saw the likes of Gates, The Afghan Whigs, St. Vincent, and Low Roar hoist the seriously cool shit trophy [pictured below]. Many worthy artists are considered, but it takes something truly special to garner an SMA. Acclaimed musicians like The War on Drugs,The Antlers, and Sharon Van Etten have all previously been nominated but walked away empty handed. In short, this is a damn prestigious thing – and at the very least, it beats out the Country Music Awards.
There were many personalities that I considered bringing on board to host this year’s installment. Conan O’Brien, Stephen Colbert, Donald Trump — however, Judio! had dibs [citation: 12/02/14], so I do request that you direct all of your questions and frustration over this list at him. If you’d like to offer praise, my shoutbox is always open. And of course, without further ado, here are the 2015 SMA’s. I hope you find them as riveting as I do. PS: I’ve dedicated a heartfelt 2015 mixtape to all of Sputnik, which…
It isn’t often that I feel compelled to share cover versions of songs. Then again, most covers aren’t so stunning that they stop you in your tracks. Run River North’s take on the famous Killers’ single “Mr. Brightside” is absolutely breathtaking, and if you haven’t already stumbled upon it by accident, then you are about to be in for a real treat. Take my word for it: if you can spare the next four and a half minutes, listening to this may very well be the best decision you make today.
Run River North takes the familiarity of a pop song that many of us grew up with and turns it completely upside down — in the most beautiful way possible, of course. From the pristine acoustic picking that gently opens the track to the towering duet that draws everything to a fittingly epic close, the track has been very creatively re-imagined. For a song that’s been revisited by so many artists, it’s safe to say that nobody has ever done “Mr. Brightside” as well as this group. They even give the Killers a run for their money. But before you begin casting your stones and accusing me of blasphemy, I implore you to give this the attention it deserves. If you’re intrigued, you can check out more by this band here and/or read up on their self-titled LP. Enjoy.
It’s a bit of a busy time this season, but I hope you’re all doing well. As a consequence of the busy season, I couldn’t corral all the staffers to contribute, so some writers and/or genres are going to be underrepresented.
This will hopefully change as we gear up for the Year-End list, and perhaps my Lions will actually decide to win a game by December. To help out you non-sports people, I won’t use specific names.
Star Receiver: “Alright, we need to score two touchdowns in two minutes. What are we going to do?”
Quarterback: “I dunno, hopefully we just march down the field and throw it deep to you twice. Let’s see what our offensive coordinator says.”
Offensive Coordinator: “How many time outs we got?”
Head Coach: “Zero. We have no timeouts.”
Offensive Coordinator: “THREE YARD SCREENS UP THE MIDDLE, I GUESS! BUT FIRST LET’S RUN THE BALL TO REALLY SURPRISE THEM.”
I need to adopt a new team.
Anyway, enjoy these last few weeks as we roll into Q4. –Jom
David Maxim Micic feat. Dan Wieten – “Satellite” (08:36) Eco Listen if you like:Devin Townsend, The Omega Experiment Bandcamp | Facebook
While I absolutely adore ECO, as I adore most of David Maxim Micic’s unreasonably brilliant albums, “Satellite” is undoubtedly its most forward and upbeat rocker. Built around a charming little marimba piece and utilizing the very talented…
