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.
For me, it was “In the End”. Hit play on that sampled piano riff and damn, I’m immediately lost inside a thousand memories; pretty much all of which consist of either trying (and failing) to rap the verses with my high school friends, or sitting in front of the MTV channel wide-eyed, annoying my parents while I waited for that one video with the awesome moving statues in it. Pretty much everyone will have a different jumping-on point, though: were you drawn in by “Faint”, and its hyper-cool video where we only saw the band’s silhouettes from behind? Or “Numb” with that absolute monster of a chorus, potentially even the Jay-Z-ified “Numb/Encore” remix for extra cred? Could be you’re an obsessive fan who trawls through the LPUnderground catalogue in their spare time and names “QWERTY” as their favourite Linkin Park song, or maybe you missed the train on them entirely and roll your eyes at the rest of us buying in on this cheesy rap-rock trend. Wherever inside that spectrum you land, it’s cool, because love them or hate them, it was pretty damn impossible to ignore Linkin Park at the beginning of the new millennium.
It started with Hybrid Theory in 2000, an album that somehow manages to sound fresh and vital despite coming from the heart of the most dated genre to ever exist. It’s all in the energy of the thing, of course – “By Myself” with those copper-wire metallic shrieks, “Papercut”…
Hello world, and welcome to a first-of-its-kind staff blog, one written by someone with no reviews and pedestrian/almost non-existent music taste. I joined the site when I was trying to find something to fall deeply into, and I thought being the only person I knew that liked Led Zeppelin meant that I could become a SERIOUS music listener. Of course, I failed and, besides a real weak stream of bands I like, I don’t listen to much music. As a result, I stopped regularly visiting the site after maybe 6 months of being a regular commenting member. Nevertheless, I returned to the site because I found a different interest.
Now, I’m not an expert in this kind of stuff. I didn’t actually get a degree in the kind of thing that would make one a said expert. More than anything I’m a diligent and creative googler, the level at which you can fake expertise. I like data. Since I decide I liked data, I have done SERIOUS data guy stuff. I started to keep track of my stats in video games like COD: BO and Rocket League, and I analyzed this here website. (That’s it. There’s not really a third thing, I tried making a tool to help me with a fantasy football draft once, but people were drafting so fast it actually was probably more costly than useful.)
So, as best I could tell, these blogs will go something like this: I’ll write some kind of description of…
Friends and neighbours, I’ve got a theory. My thinking is this: pop songs, when executed to such a high degree we can basically round up to saying they’re perfect, achieve a level of embedded, canonised love in the minds of the public that no other genre can really hope to accomplish, partly due to pop’s pre-established advantage of being ever-present on radios and TV. In other words: perfect pop songs are better (or at the very least, more effective) than perfect songs of other genres. Of course the very thing that gives good pop songs their boost is the same thing that makes bad ones so insufferable – the fact that radio will pound them into the ground for months after release, their seemingly simplistic or shallow arrangements, and the ability (if not explicit goal) to stay stuck in your head for days on end. Pop has maybe the largest gap of any genre between its good stuff and its “Shape Of You”‘s, and this dichotomy is what causes ‘pop’ to be a dirty word in the minds of many even in the year of our Lorde 2017. But when a tune is done perfectly, with respect to the form and real feeling, it can become a symbol to represent entire periods of time, feelings or entire sub-cultures of people in a way that puts other genres to shame. Go on and have a small list of perfect pop songs, then, and tell me how hard you disagree.
Here’s a list of major new releases for the week of July 14, 2017. Please feel free to request reviews for any of the following albums from staff or contributors.
– List of Releases: July 14, 2017 –
Bloodclot: Up In Arms
Genre: Metal/Hard Rock // Label: Metal Blade Records
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Boris: Dear
Genre: Drone/Doom Metal // Label: Sargent House
Here’s a list of major new releases for the week of July 7, 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: Broken Social Scene – “Hug of Thunder”–
Genre: Indie Rock/Experimental // Label: Arts & Crafts
Background:
After a seven year layover, Broken Social Scene has returned with all fifteen of its original members. Hug of Thunder marks the follow-up to 2010’s Forgiveness Rock Record, as the band reunites for what Kevin Drew summarized as “…since we’re an anthemic band, we wanted to bring the celebration…It was important for all of us to come together because it’s the only thing we can politically do at this moment in time.” To date, four songs from the record have been officially released, but you can now also stream the whole album via NPR [see below link].
Here’s a list of major new releases for the weeks of June 16-30 of 2017. Please feel free to request reviews for any of the following albums from staff or contributors.
16 June
Alison Moyet: Other
2 Chainz: Pretty Girls Like Trap Music
Arcadea: Arcadea
Bad Cop/Bad Cop: Warriors
Barb Wire Dolls: Rub My Mind
B Boys: Dada
Beth Ditto: Fake Sugar
Big Boi: Boomiverse
Broadside: Paradise
Carach Angren: Dance And Laugh Amongst The Rotten
Cavernlight: As We Cup Our Hands And Drink From The Stream Of Our Ache
Chief Keef: Thot Breaker
Chuck Berry: Chuck
CKY: The Phoenix
Com Truise: Iteration
Currents: The Place I Feel Safest
Dead Head: Swine Plague
Doll Skin: Manic Pixie Dream Girl
The Drums: Abysmal Thoughts
Elegy of Madness: New Era
Entrails: World Inferno
Fleet Foxes: Crack Up
Gaytheist: Let’s Jam Again Soon
House and Land: House and Land
Hundredth: Rare
Iced Earth: Incorruptible
Igorrr: Savage Sinusoid
Impetuous Ritual: Blight Upon Martyred Sentience
Jefre Cantu-Ledesma: On The Echoing Green
Kevin Morby: City Music
Lorde: Melodrama
Matthew Sweet: Tomorrow Forever
Michael Nau: Some Twist
Oh Wonder: Oh Wonder
Palehound: A Place I’ll Always Go
Peaking Lights: The Fifth State Of Consciousness
Portugal. The Man: Woodstock
Ride: Weather Diaries
Royal Blood: How Did…
Here’s a list of major new releases for the week of June 9, 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: Sufjan Stevens, Bryce Dressner, Nico Muhly, and James McAlister – “Planetarium”–
In 2013, Sufjan Stevens joined up with Nico Muhly, James McAlister, and The National’s Bryce Dressner to create a composition thematically centered around our solar system (I guess he is too big for states now). To date only performed in a live setting (the piece was debuted at Brooklyn Academy of Music over a multi-night span), it is finally being released as an official recording on June 9 via 4AD. It’s pretty much the most hipster thing ever.
Listen to the project’s single “Mercury”:
– Full List of Releases: June 2, 2017 –
Agent Blå: Agent Blue
Genre: Indie/Lo-fi // Label: Kanine Records
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Anathema: The Optimist
Genre: Progressive Rock/Doom Metal // Label: kscope
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Barrabus: Barrabus
Genre: Hard Rock/Metal // Label: Undergroove
Here’s a list of major new releases for the week of June 2, 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.
Alt-J have become one of indie-rock’s surging experimental acts, thanks to their extremely well-received debut An Awesome Wave as well as their more divisive – but equally impressive – sophomore effort This Is All Yours. If the singles are any indication, RELAXER will further the band’s legacy as innovators within their genre, expounding upon the brand of downtempo art-pop that illuminated sections of 2014’s This Is All Yours. It feels like a defining moment for a band that continues to stretch the confines of its own comfort zone, joining a rather exclusive arena of indie’s most respected, forward-thinking artists. Sink into the record’s lead single, ‘3WW’, for a taste of what is on the horizon.
Listen to Alt-J’s “3WW”:
– Full List of Releases: June 2, 2017 –
Adrenaline Mob: We The People
Genre: Hard Rock/Heavy Metal // Label: Century Media
Broken Social Scene’s “Skyline” is serenely pleasant, even if it’s a little watered down.
Euphoria. That’s the word that keeps coming to mind with each new song released in advance of Broken Social Scene’s comeback record Hug of Thunder, set to drop on July 7th. We heard it on “Halfway Home”, which sounded like a “we are back” statement with layered vocals in the chorus and its twin guitar assault. Despite being somewhat generic in overall structure, it was simply a rush to hear these guys back in their element making music together. The title track, in case you missed it, slowed things down a bit and showed a more vulnerable side to the album – but with “Skyline”, they’re back to the aforementioned wave of euphoria that is now appearing to be the unifying aura behind Hug of Thunder.
Broken Social Scene have worked with more complex and creative concepts before, but that’s not a totally scathing indictment. Yes, all three of the tracks revealed so far tone down their experimental reputation in favor of more commonplace indie-rock aesthetics, but the results have never been so listenable or utterly pleasant. The acoustic guitars wash over your ears, like you’re standing a few hundred feet away from a massive waterfall and just letting the mist hit you in the face. Like with “Halfway Home”, the vocals are very much a gang effort, but the contrasting styles blend together so smoothly that you’ll wonder…
![Lust For Life [Explicit]](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51a3mjf6j2L._SS500.jpg)
![Times Infinity Volume Two [Explicit]](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51X4L4k96iL._SS500.jpg)
![Nightmare Future [Explicit]](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/612Qz-FyAyL._SS500.jpg)
![Agent Blue [Explicit]](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51W-WBvh91L._SS500.jpg)
![Barrabus [Explicit]](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41ywLrFDfoL._SS500.jpg)
…
![Last Young Renegade [Explicit]](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/612F1RQte3L._SS500.jpg)
