One of my favorite album restructurings has to be the one I did years ago for Viva La Vida and Prospekt’s March, which I’m going to re-publish as part of this new series I’m doing. The LP (VLV) and the bonus follow-up collection (PM) are each superb in their own right, but in blending the best of them, you get a truly special – dare I say perfect – pop/rock record. Chances are if you’re not a huge Coldplay nerd I’ve already lost your attention, so I’ll cut through all the fanfare and just get right down to my playlist and the reasoning as to why I structured it the way I did.
The album begins with “Life in Technicolor II” – I chose this version because it is more fully fleshed out than its instrumental counterpart. The band stripped away the vocals from the original version “Life in Technicolor” in 2008 because it sounded too much like “an obvious single”, but I much prefer the full bodied track with Chris Martin’s stunningly beautiful melodic arc. “Viva La Vida” fits in nicely early as a symphonically-charged highlight – on the original LP, the breathtaking title track was hidden too far back in the listing. When it comes to Coldplay, I’m all about instant gratification, and that song hooks you in immediately. I had to be careful about maintaining the flow and delicate balance of Viva La Vida while blending these songs together, because there’s nothing wrong…
Welcome back once again to KILL or KEEP, where we take a classic album that everyone knows but not everyone loves, and run it through a set of users with conflicting takes. They will consume the album for public entertainment and post their slander for all to see.
This time is a little different because our most ambitious plans got postponed for boring reasons andwe didn’t want to leave things hanging for too long. The solution? Do what the rest of the Sputnikmusic userbase does when it runs out of ideas and needs a ten-a-penny Masterpiece to chew over:
We are listening to Deftones. Specifically White Pony, but if there’s one thing we can tell you about White Pony right off the bat, it’s that it certainly is a Deftones record.
Deftones are a band that needs no introduction. What a relief. Today’s KILL or KEEP is brought to you by Pheromone and JohnnyoftheWell, but we felt a little self-conscious about trawling through one of the most lowest-common-denominator Sputnik classics as two of the most washed up Sputnik personalities, so we decided to add some spice by fishing out a new friend from our Discord web of horror. Please welcome Windowpain11 toSputnikmusic!
Rules
Each participant must KILL and KEEP a minimum of three songs. Because White Pony is a pretty tiny album by KILL or KEEP standards,…
Concerts have been a go in New York City for a little while now. Their return on an appreciable scale was first and quietly signaled by rough-and-tumble DIY venues (some of them really people’s backyards) throwing small shows in early June or so, often sheepishly asking for proof of vaccination at the door. Then, perhaps less than a month later, more sizable spaces like Brooklyn’s Our Wicked Lady and Elsewhere (both notably brandishing rooftops) and Manhattan’s The Bowery Electric started to let people into their 200+-capacity spaces, to let those people not wear masks, let them kiss and dance and whatever, usually but not always with proof of vaccination required as well. Fellow Sputnikmusic compatriot ArsMoriendi and I, neither of us from NYC but both sorta equidistant to it, had to check this new (but really actually old) phenomenon out.
Or, well, that’s kinda how it happened. Above all and in the first place, we were stoked to see a Facebook event advertising the first “post”-COVID show of a band whose hyperactive, glammy and psychedelic debut LP we together hawked on this very site, with some minor notable successes. The album is called Long Haired Locusts (2020); the band is called Godcaster. We had heard they were awesome live, and proof of their dominance in the arena of live performance was everywhere on the Internet (check out this clip, awesomely shot by one Santo Donia, of a 2019 show in New Jersey), and even felt like it inhered in the math-y, frenetic hooks that make…
Call it a wildly unnecessary hobby, but one thing I’ve always enjoyed about music is re-ordering album tracklists. I do it with albums I enjoy just as much as albums I dislike, always in an attempt to arrange the music even better somehow. I find I get the most out of it on albums that have potential, but are either overinflated, fall short in a few key areas, or are accompanied by an EP/b-sides release with a handful of stronger moments than the actual LP.
It’s with great anticipation of Thrice’s 11th upcoming album, Horizons/East (due out September 17th), that I kick things off with a way to re-imagine their previous effort Palms – which fits the latter two of the above descriptions. Songs like ‘Hold Up a Light’ and ‘My Soul’ were obvious weak spots and were easily discarded from the original tracklist in this mock-up, while I also – but more begrudgingly – parted ways with ‘Only Us’ and ‘Everything Belongs’ on the grounds that they’re both relatively average versions of songs that Thrice did better on the very same LP. I then imported the entirety of the Deeper Wells EP, which I feel is a much stronger effort in general compared to the Palms tunes that I just discarded. Finally, I arranged them in a way meant to flow, dazzle, and rock your socks off.
One thing Palms lacked was a kickass starter, but ‘Deeper Wells’ lights a fire with its political lyrics (referencing Trump’s wall) and vitriolic delivery.…
Here’s a list of major new releases for the week of June 11th, 2021. Please feel free to request reviews for any of the following albums from staff and/or contributors.
– List of Releases: June 11, 2021 –
AFI: Bodies
Genre: Alt rock Label: Rise Records
Azure Ray: Remedy
Genre: Indie folk Label: Flower Moon Records
Cold Cave: Fate In Seven Lessons
Genre: Darkwave Label: Heartworm Press
Crypta: Echoes of the Soul
Genre: Death metal Label: Napalm Records
Danny Elfman: Big Mess
Genre: Alternative Label: Anti-Records
Dean Blunt: Black Metal 2
Genre: Hip Hop Label: Rough Trade
Distant: Aeons of Oblivion
Genre: Deathcore Label: Unique Leader
Dornenreich: Du Wilde Liebe Sei
Genre: Black metal Label: Prophecy Productions
Eremit: Bearer of Many Names
Genre: Sludge / Doom metal Label: Transcending Obscurity
Welcome back once again to KILL or KEEP, where we take a classic album that everyone knows but not everyone loves, and run it through a set of users with conflicting takes. They will jam the album for public entertainment and post their hot takes for all to see.
Except this time it is different.
It is time for change. It is time for an album that, perhaps, everyone does love. The last two installments in the series were directed at bloated capital–penis-shaped–M Masterpieces by men with huge egos and poor evaluations of the limitations of their talents.
This must be the opposite.
We will examine a female songwriter whose attention is entirely occupied with relatable subject matter, whose songwriting models is excessive in its leanness, whose sound has been diluted to the perfect vanilla average by wave upon wave of unseen collaborators. We turn now to true greatness. It is time for Carly Rey Jepsen.
Carly Rae Jepsen
Some would say that it is always time for Carly Rae Jepsen; we respectfully counter that now is the time for specifically KILLing and KEEPing her lauded sugaropus Emotion, by which we mean both Side A and Side B. That’s 20 tracks: primo K/K territory (but no bonus tracks because we don’t have that time)!
Do you ever listen to music and feel like it was made for you, when it clearly wasn’t? Sometimes even when you know an artist absolutely has not had the same experiences, something about their music feels personalized, as if they were watching your life and wrote it with you in mind. I can’t speak for the entire transgender population, obviously, but I have a theory that trans people face this more than other people. We don’t have the privilege of being surrounded by art that was created by people like us, for people like us. As much as trans music has achieved more mainstream acceptance in the past decade (looking at you, Arca, SOPHIE, and 100 Gecs), there’s still very little out there, especially for people who like music that isn’t pop-adjacent experimental electronic. I think there is a lot of discussion to be had about what makes some music so relatable to certain trans people (read: me, a trans woman). So that’s what this is about – music that isn’t specifically for or by trans people that feels like it is.
First on my list is “Morning Train (Nine to Five)” by Sheena Easton. This song is very traditional in its portrayal of gender roles, glorifying a man who works hard to find his (narrating) wife waiting for him when he gets back home, fucks her that night, and then continues the cycle the next day. It’s understandable that from an outside perspective, this…
First and foremost, it’s very unlikely that you’ll have heard of Eric Solomon. The Canadian artist briefly surfaced sometime between the late 2000s and early 2010s, most notably with the release of electro-pop single “A.L.L.” in 2010; I remember hearing that on constant rotation, here in Vancouver. At one point it even reached top 20 in the Billboard chart, in no small part thanks to an MTV appearance by Eric on defunct docu-drama The Youth Electric. Perhaps it would be a disservice to Eric Solomon’s musical abilities to focus on the trajectory of his (no longer) public image, but when you have a copy of his EP that no longer seems to exist on the Internet, you can’t help but wonder how someone who achieved a decent amount of radio play and publicity has, quite simply, disappeared from the Internet.
(In fact, “A.L.L.” wasn’t even the only song of Eric to have received radio play; I recall that “I Found Love” and “Lottery”, which both fall into the same stylistic vein, were both on air at some point. Strangely enough, the latter can now only be found in remixed versions.)
Search results reveal no social media presence, as well as few download or streaming links to his material — YouTube comes up with autofill results for song titles that lead to no actual video, and anything that does pop up on video sites…
Ever since I was a kid, I’ve had a strange fascination with the end of the world. I know, I know – it’s practically a worn out cliche in 2020, when everything from SARS-CoV-2 to militarized police brutality casts an apocalyptic shadow over our lives…but I just can’t help myself. Part of it is a product of my religious upbringing – even if I’ve become a skeptic over time, certain things still temporarily give me pause. For example, I watched with fascination as mysterious trumpet-like sounds blasted out of the sky from every corner of the globe – knowing that there’s a scientific explanation (stealth aircrafts, the hum of a meteor, HAARP experiments), but also allowing myself to tumble down the rabbit hole enough to imagine that we’re actually hearing some sort of ominous preamble to Revelation‘s famed seven trumpets. Toss in the blood moon tetrad from 2014-2015 (“The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and terrible day of the Lord”), rampant locust outbreaks, COVID-19, riots, and now a historic continent-spanning dust storm that is blotting out the sun in certain regions – and it’s enough for even a cynic to begin wondering.
From a musical perspective, mewithoutYou’s 2015 LP Pale Horses rekindled my obsession with “the end” via terrifying accounts of a nuclear holocaust which fused Biblical and secular imagery. Trump’s shocking election the very next year and…
One of my favorite phenomena in music is when a band renowned for pristine, flawless production has lesser-known/stripped-down roots. It’s actually a very common occurrence, as typically bands enrich their sound over time when better resources/more expensive equipment becomes available. Nevertheless, I felt that it would make for an interesting set of case studies, observing where a band began, what they ended up sounding like, and whether that journey made them better or worse (in this blog, “before” indicates they were better before polishing their brand, “after” implies the opposite). There are several examples that could be used, but today I’m going to go with a handful of artists that have been making frequent rounds on my rotation of music. We begin with one of my all-time favorite bands, The Antlers:
Case Study #1: The Antlers
In contrasting ‘Palace’ from The Antlers’ 2014 LP Familiars to ‘In the Attic’ off their 2007 sophomore record In The Attic of the Universe, you can hear the development of the band’s sound quite clearly. On ‘Palace’, frontman Peter Silberman reins supreme, his vocals the central focus of everything as the surrounding instrumentation is highly orchestral and elegant. It works wonderfully, resulting in a crystalline, glass-like glaze that covers the album. If you’re anything like me, you got into The Antlers later in their career – probably circa Hospice – so it was quite the aesthetic shock when I trekked backwards to In The Attic of the Universe,…
It’s not always about being on the cutting edge. Sometimes, as hard as it can be to slow yourself down, it’s just about living in the moment and taking it all in.
An interesting thing happened to my perception of music over time. If you were to go back to my heyday on this website – let’s say 2010-2012 just for argument’s sake – everything changed my life. That heartfelt guitar solo. The lyric about overcoming depression. The slow burner that paralleled my own rage boiling beneath the surface. Everything was so relatable. Every moment within the music mattered.
Now, I can barely feel it.
The music plays, and I can discern (certainly to a debatable extent among some of you) the quality albums from the poor ones. Occasionally I’ll get wrapped up in a moment, but then that moment passes and I move on to the next one. Gone are the days where an album would imprint itself upon my life; there’s no Southern Air that defines my marriage the way that pop-punk slice of summer originally did for my most meaningful relationship. There is no The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me that makes me question my faith in 2020. I’ve tried in vain to find an album to emotionally attach to the birth of my son, but I keep coming up empty-handed. Maybe I’m burned out, or maybe I’m just getting way too old for this…
I’m not sure what’s made 2020 crazier for me so far: all this coronavirus & social distancing, or the fact that I suddenly really dig both country and R&B. It’s a weird feeling listening to so much Honey Harper and Mac Miller, only to dive into Psychotic Waltz right after. You’ll find all kinds of variety on my Q1 Mixtape, which I hope will help you pass some isolation/self-quarantining time while also – maybe – discovering a new artist. Here’s 100 songs that stuck with me from January to March, in alphabetical order by artist name. I suggest you click ‘shuffle’ and let yourself get sucked into the weird, swirling genre vortex that is my current musical taste. Hope you enjoy.
This is part of a hopefully ongoing series in which I dissect the previous decade using media as a lens. As a first installment this is old, written about a year ago, and was published elsewhere on a website now defunct. I hereby resurrect it here, warts and all. Next installment: how The National Fucked Us Over. Cheers. Shaka.
Those of a conspiratorially-minded constitution will probably already be aware of this, but a particularly bizarre one – as with all the good ones, it doesn’t have so much of an urtext but is rendered in variations the lucidity of which depends on your interlocuters sobriety or lack thereof, or how frequently they starting gumming themselves – involves the C.I.A. using what we now term “identity politics” to stifle proliferating socialist movements in 1970’s America. As with all good conspiracy theories, there’s more than a kernel of truth to it. Declassified documents reveal a sinister level of adroit manoeuvring by intelligence agencies on this front: when Black rights, Queer rights and Women’s rights movements throughout America were reaching peak agitation levels, Intelligence agencies didn’t stoke the fire exactly – but they did see a way it could be weaponised against the most unholy of Evils, Communism. It wasn’t as simple as sending a conventionally beautiful woman with a mission of collapsing socialist rhetoric to a women’s rally, although there was that. They augmented this predictable approach by bringing out the agent provocateurs. To those galvanised by the prospect of much-needed equality…
It’s almost surreal to remember reading this site’s 2000-2009 decade list like it was yesterday, and now be a part of the new one that’s on-deck. And just as clearly, I remember turning the page to the 2010s, with the likes of Titus Andronicus’ The Monitor, The Tallest Man on Earth’s The Wild Hunt, Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, and Deftones’ Diamond Eyes all – among others – making early splashes. It’s weird to think that we’re all on the precipice of repeating that. What will 2020 bring? Surely at least a few releases that we’ll still be talking about in December 2029.
Decade milestones are huge, especially for time spent on a website. I’ve been here going on 12 years and there are others who have been here even longer. It’s caused some reflecting on my part, and I’ve put some serious thought into how I want to approach the next decade. As such, I’m going to put out a few “new decade resolutions”:
-> Stricter Rating: I’ve had as much fun as anyone handing out 4.5’s and 5’s to everything I enjoy, but the time to put things in perspective is long overdue. I’m not sure how this will impact my historical ratings and reviews, but moving forward I plan to reestablish some credibility to my assessments. I take pride in my writing and now I want my scores to reflect that. Expect future reviews/ratings to adhere much more closely…
Monday December 6th, 1999. This day marks the release of George Michael’s surprising left-field covers album, Songs From the Last Century. As if there wasn’t enough evidence to support George’s case already, Songs From the Last Century marks as yet another clear-cut example of an artist being driven by their love of music – devoted to the craft – and not money. There was always a sense of satisfaction when George plotted his next move, as it always seemed to go against the grain on what people thought he should do next. You have to remember that Songs From the Last Century was a relatively ballsy move for George at the time, as it was succeeding his magnum opus, Older: a timeless classic that displayed a sophisticated new sound and image – a smooth, soulful and jazzy sound palette that was underpinned by macabre themes and a setup for his rawest personal-healing-lyric-writing to date. The thing is, while Songs From the Last Century sounds like an arbitrary left-turn on paper, the execution isn’t that far removed from its predecessor; the LP works as an extremely organic continuation on from Older, with the twist being that George is giving out renditions to some of his favourite songs. This project was clearly a “hobby album” – a reactionary response to getting over his 1996 classic, by making something that was fun and full of positivity. Older’s blueprint is…
