Here’s a list of major new releases for the week of February 23, 2018. 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
Cabal: Mark of Rot Genre: Blackened Death Metal/Djent // Label: Long Branch Records
Background:
Cabal is an upcoming band from Copenhagen, Denmark. Their sound is like a marriage between Meshuggah and Ulcerate with black metal synths. Mark of Rot succeeds because it manages to blend the varying influences into one seamless sound that mixes rhythmic riffs that are huge in sound with an oppressive atmosphere that transitions between black metal and industrial influences. The vocals, too, run the scope from guttural death metal to black metal shrieks.
“Blackened Soil”:
– Full List of Releases: February 23, 2018 –
All The Luck In The World: A Blind Arcade
Genre: Folk // Label: Self-Released
Check out our Staff Review courtesy of SowingSeason.
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Avslut: Deceptis
Genre: Black Metal // Label: Osmose Productions
Stream Deceptis here.
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Cabal: Mark of Rot
Genre: Blackened Death Metal/Djent // Label: Long Branch Records
Here’s a list of major new releases for the week of February 16, 2018. 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
Senses Fail: If There Is Light, It Will Find You
Genre: Post Hardcore // Label: Pure Noise Records
Background:
Senses Fail started out as an equal blend of pop punk and post hardcore, but with each subsequent album they slowly dropped the pop elements and increased the hardcore. Despite this slow build up, the sound of their fifth album, Renacer, was still a shock for fans. Suddenly, any hint of pop punk or even the friendlier side of post hardcore was missing — Renacer and it’s follow-up Pull The Thorns From Your Heart, were pretty much metallic hardcore with barely any clean singing or catchy choruses to speak of. As much as Renacer was a sudden swing in style, If There Is Light… is just as drastic, but in the opposite direction. Sounding like the golden era of Let It Enfold You and Still Searching, If There is Light… is the return of what most fans probably loved most about Senses Fail — huge hooks, pop punk vocals coupled with hardcore shouts, and enough emotional baggage for any three other people.
TalonsOfFire here – This is the second of a series of staff on staff interviews. Arcade and I decided to keep things conversational, but in the interest of clarity, my posts are bold. Enjoy!
I’m glad to finally see someone else enjoyed the new LCD Soundsystem as much as I did. Why do you think it got such a mixed reaction from so many fans that were initially excited that the band were back?
I’ll be honest, I wasn’t under the impression American Dream was doing too poorly until they cancelled their Australian tour recently and chalked it up to ‘scheduling conflicts,’ or some other code for ‘nobody’s buying.’ It’s especially jarring considering the hullabaloo around a year or 2 ago that made it seem like this was meant to be the next big comeback. Blogs were hyping this as a bigger deal than the Guns n’ Roses reunion, and now here we are, with what is probably their worst album yet.
But (and I hate to say this because it’s actually the stupidest thing to say and doesn’t articulate very much, but whatever I’ll say it anyway) that’s still pretty good, considering Sound of Silver and This is Happening are meant to be classics of that whole David Byrne soundalike New York thing that was inexplicably big about 15 years ago. In that sense, I think American Dream was sufficient synth bullshit for that audience of guys in their 30s with receding hairlines and a evangelical love of New…
The first month of 2018 proved to be a little slow for under-the-radar releases, as it typically is for any music in general. When We Land’s Introvert’s Plight was a pleasant surprise, offering up a very consistent indie-rock record that contained moments of lush folk amidst more sprightly, upbeat melodies. I initially gave that a hype rating of 7 (70%), and it actually earned a 3.8 (76%). On the other hand, EDEN’s Vertigo was underwhelming in just about every way. It did have some unique draw-ins, but they were never successfully strung together in a way that would make it worth revisiting. That album came in just short of it’s 5 (50%) projection, garnering just a 2 (40%) in my recent review of it. All The Luck In The World’s Blind Arcade is still set for a 2/23 release, and it’s very much near the top of my radar. Expect a review for that album soon after it drops!
Anyhow, it’s time for another batch of albums that I have at least some level of interest in. If you’ll recall, I am limiting my 2018 reviewing scope to artists who could be categorically “under-the-radar” – be it on Sputnik or in general. Some of the below artists do have more name recognition that what I’d typically aim for, but none of them are by any means popular and will likely only end up with a handful of reviews across the greater web. Thus, without further ado, here’s Sowing’s Hype Machine…
By 1975 in New York City, the first wave of punk had floated to the top of the underground, seeping into pop culture and making small doomed stars of its first insurgents. CBGB in the East Village had become a bastion of young iconoclasts re-shaping rock music into something decidedly more septic. Both the New York Dolls and Detroit’s Iggy Pop (fresh off the Stooges imploding) had become havoc-prone headliners through the city’s club circuit. And Lou Reed and Patti Smith had been flung onto the ambo as gutter sibyls, performance visionaries who seemed to know something most didn’t. Malcom McLaren had taken the bug across the pond and birthed the Sex Pistols and the fever caught. It was all happening, and new eager bands were springing up like lice. By ’77, in the midst of that mass push to forge froth-mouthed, frenetic rock n’ roll, a small seed of a meta-revolt was brewing inside punk’s inherently meat-headed tendencies. Stray architects who were looking to do away with glam-blam flash and the charming lobotomy of Ramones, to make music that was as agile as it was intellectual, all the while avoiding sounding sterile and over-meticulous, a pratfall that occasionally haunted both Television and Talking Heads. These were young kids who loved both the stylish hollowness of the French New Wave and the undiluted freedom that punk was crawling with before its first commercial take-over. Artists like Richard Hell, David Thomas, Lizzy Mercier Descloux and the like, were chasing the…
Here’s a list of major new releases for the week of February 9, 2018. 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
Son Lux: Brighter Wounds
Genre: Trip-Hop/Electronic // Label: City Slang
Background:
New York City composer Ryan Lott returns with his 5th full-length LP. The album is available to stream in full courtesy of NPR, or you can simply check out the lead single “Dream State”, below.
“Dream State”:
– Full List of Releases: February 9, 2018 –
The Atlas Moth: Coma Noir
Genre: Sludge Metal // Label: Prosthetic
Long Island alt-rock/indie outfit The Republic of Wolves have made new details available surrounding their upcoming third LP, shrine. The record now has an official release date of March 27, 2018, and will feature the below artwork and tracklist. There will be three bonus tracks on the album as well, with titles that are as-of-yet TBD:
01. The Canyon 02. Bask 03. Sundials 04. Birdless Cage 05. Mitama 06. Dialogues 07. Northern Orthodox 08. Colored Out 09. Ore 10. Worry If You Want (Yume)
Two of the songs from the above tracklist have already been released. “Mitama” and “Northern Orthodox” can be heard here. A version of “Birdless Cage” was also created for NPR’s Tiny Desk Contest, although it allegedly differs from the version that will appear on shrine.
“Mitama“
“Northern Orthodox“
Additionally, for those who haven’t been following the most recent developments, the group has also been releasing studio updates regarding the album. These installments can be viewed below:
“Bit of a dark spiral with no end, I thought” – Algeria Touchshriek
For brevity’s sake, I’ll leave my thoughts on the first three decades of Bowie for another time, except to say that his 70s output is among the greatest run of any artist in history and his 80s output is… not. Even in his worst decade, the man remained a fascinating enigma, screaming his lungs out over Japanese spoken word and Robert Fripp’s angle grinder on one album, giving us “Let’s Dance” on the next. His tacky 80s pop set the stage for a massive comeback that wouldn’t really come until The Next Day or Blackstar, if it came at all; which leaves the 90s and 00s as somewhat stopgap decades, a time period most Bowie purists consider to be when he released stuff that was better than Never Let Me Down but worse than most of the rest. Conversely, though, this stopgap holds two of Bowie’s absolute best; and the first of the two sounds little like pretty much anything else.
So: Outside, or to be pedantic, 1. Outside. A frustrating listen from the outset, if you go in with the knowledge that it’s the first in a pentalogy that was never completed, one inspired by the fear of the upcoming millennium and built on a concept about art crime serial killings investigated by a noir detective who talks out of the side of the mouth. Even writing it makes it sound like a Blade Runner…
To be fair to CHVRCHES, I’m not entirely sure what progression for them sounds like. Does it sound like some backwards adoption of analogue synths and sound collage as an experimental form? The alternative to that would be to go bigger, less subtle, and more infectious with their pop songs, and I don’t know if they’re capable of that. They’ve already perfected vague ennui and a handful hooks for a few years now, and so the success of their songs relies almost entirely on their quality, rather than they do the scope or breadth of their ambition.
Which is why it is difficult to assess “Get Out,” because on first listen it’s just not very good. The verses aren’t especially memorable, which automatically robs them of a place to put at least one good hook, and the chorus is only memorable because it’s basic, not because it’s familiar. You’ve heard it before, but it’s not nostalgia; it’s just another pop rock song in a litany of others. But fans of Every Open Eye can make the credible case that, as it became clearer and clearer that CHVRCHES weren’t going to be doing much other than writing a few good songs, it slowly revealed itself as a decent enough album. There exists the possibility that the same might happen for “Get Out,” and so I won’t go too hard into its faults (moreover, it being boring). The fundamentals of the song remain the same, however; its melody isn’t impressive, its instrumentation is lifeless, and…
Hello voters, and welcome to a post about a long running music poll. The Pazz & Jop Poll is a year end Album of the Year list scored by votes tabulated from an assortment of elite music critics. In fact, the most elite music critic (outside of PSH’s character in Almost Famous, I guess), Robert Christgau, created it and has voted in it for every instance since its inception — even after he was fired from the Village Voice.
About it’s scoring methodology… without realizing it, I essentially copied the Pazz & Jop scoring system for our very own end of the year user list. Each voter gets 100 points to allot to ten albums, the max an album can be given is 30 points and the minimum is 5 points (which is where P&J diverges from the scoring system I implemented for the user vote, since our minimum was 1 point). The methodology for the best song portion is that each voter gets to pick 10 songs, and the count of mentions decides the ranking (much like our Staff year end song list was scored… or was it?) So, voters of sputnik’s year end poll, you voted just like all the titans of music criticism you looked up to your whole lives, but how similarly to professional music critics did you guys/gals vote?
From 2008 to 2016, Glenn McDonald oversaw the scoring and other analytics for the P&J poll. On his site, he has all the data of each…
It’s with hearty congratulations that we welcome three new staff members to our team today!
Without further ado, please welcome Frippertronics, ScuroFantasma, and Verdant to the list of professional writers here at Sputnikmusic.com. These users have displayed exceptional skills, and now you’ll get to read their review summaries on Metacritic. Stay sharp, fellas!
Also, it is time to usher in a new litter of contributors – all of whom have given us reason to look towards the future with optimism:
We’d like to take this time to thank everyone who applied. It was a really tight decision for some, so if you think you should have been promoted, you’re probably right. There will almost certainly be a fabled “ghost” round, and perhaps sooner than you think! Keep your nose to the grindstone.
Are you there? Okay, cool; you managed to cope with the visual documentation of why recorders were, once and for all time, a mistake nobody could compensate nor understand. Better yet, you read two volumes of some guy from the Midwest freaking out over David Bowie. What I lack in professionalism I make up for in enthusiasm, overbearing as it may be, and believe or not, this is end of the first Deep Cuts series – very much a work-in-progress – but not the end of what will become a regular mainstay of the site’s blogs for the time being. With that out of the way, we travel to 1979 to look upon the lonely and absurd Lodger.
The finale of the Berlin Triptych, Lodger already portrayed the Bowie/Eno union coming to an end. Both parties were finally losing interest, with Eno now focusing his attention towards the upstart Talking Heads and Bowie moving towards more commercial aspirations, his three-year long simultaneous detox and Krautrock/Berlin School tribute reaching its conclusion. The second track from the album, “African Night Flight”, is an anomaly even for the Berlin records, all of which featured uncompromising experimentation and challenged Bowie’s audience that had stuck around following his ventures through salacious glam excess and detached cocaine funk — or constantly alienated them and label execs, who pushed hard for more Young Americans.
The ’90s were a dark, dark time, no? Apparently so – with a clip of a sleek rendition of “Fame” and other cuts at Howard Stern’s birthday party in 1998 – and to drive the point home, with Stern’s massive posse swarming the dance floor as Bowie and co. looking not out of place, but uncomfortably dated fashion-wise, even for 1998.
But to delve even deeper into incredibly dated realms we must venture backward once more into 1967. “The Laughing Gnome” is the song David Bowie spent an entire lifetime trying to escape from. No matter how> eclectic his sounds and tastes became, this one song always found its way back to its creator, even being the punchline to a campaign NME led in 1990. Bowie was undertaking preparations for his Sound + Vision tour, with a ballot on which songs were to be included in the setlist – a specially curated “Greatest Hits” tour, but with the incentive that the songs included would then be retired at tour’s end. Of course, hits like “Space Oddity”, “Changes”, and “Blue Jean” made the cut, but one song was out of place: “The Laughing Gnome”, which somehow accumulated enough votes for Bowie to consider a Velvet Underground-influenced arrangement, although this was Bowie most likely taking the piss and making light of the NME’s “Just Say Gnome” campaign to rig the polls, which were immediately scrapped. It also would’ve…
Here’s a list of major new releases for the week of February 2, 2018. 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.
Justin Timberlake: Man of the Woods
Genre: Pop/R&B // Label: RCA
Background:
For many, The 20/20 Experience was one of the best pop albums in recent memory. It would be a tough act to follow, but that doesn’t appear to be the aim for Man of the Woods. A preliminary trailer advertising the record hinted towards a folksy, electronic venture not all that dissimilar from the works of Justin Vernon. While those expectations haven’t exactly been mirrored by the singles released so far, it’s a 16-track album – so there’s plenty of room for JT’s 5th LP to either follow the “personal” path described, or to become a haphazard mix of electronica, pop, and middling attempts at an experimental folk album. I guess we’ll see.
“Man of the Woods” Trailer:
– Full List of Releases: February 2, 2018 –
AWOLNATION: Here Come The Runts
Genre: Electronic/Indie-Pop // Label: Red Bull Records
As I see it, over time, the music of The Fall has become the staunchest formative presence in my life. Found out at fourteen, picking up a bootleg cassette of Dragnet at an outdoors market. And all through the years that followed. Blasting ‘Garden’ on long night walks. Drunkenly hopping to ‘The Classical’ at my wedding. ‘Fiery Jack’ on my headphones on repeat as I cowered in a vomit-spackled corner of the main room of that overnight Japan-Korea ferry that spent ten agonizing swinging hours moving through a Pacific tsunami. ‘Totally Wired’ rattling in my brain as I repeatedly walked out of jobs, careers, relationships, lost schmoozing opportunities, ambitions, refusing to yield, however self-effacing. ‘No Bulbs’ becoming the centerpiece of my chemical afflictions. And ‘Fantastic Life’ playing at full tilt in a bar in New Orleans outside which I got into a bloody fight with that Kentucky marine (lost a tooth, broke his jaw). As hokey and idiotically juvenile as it might be, it’s something that helped me zero in on what it meant to preserve a bit of primal soul. I danced to this music in dark rooms, and my guts were on fire.
A small lifetime ago, I worked at a record shop for an old burnt-out Brit who used to say that a proper Englishman listened to Blue Orchids in the summer, Joy Division in the winter, The Damned in autumn, Sex Pistols in spring,…
![51dhiUEKeNL._SS500[1]](http://www.sputnikmusic.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/51dhiUEKeNL._SS50011-e1519141440183.jpg)
Genre: Blackened Death Metal/Djent // Label: Long Branch Records![61DAXrg-wrL._SS500[1]](http://www.sputnikmusic.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/61DAXrg-wrL._SS5001-e1519141590957.jpg)
All The Luck In The World: A Blind Arcade![680549[1]](http://www.sputnikmusic.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/6805491-e1519141737581.jpg)
Avslut: Deceptis![51dhiUEKeNL._SS500[1]](http://www.sputnikmusic.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/51dhiUEKeNL._SS5001-e1519141801831.jpg)
Cabal: Mark of Rot![51dkLsJ479L._SS500[1]](http://www.sputnikmusic.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/51dkLsJ479L._SS5001-e1519142313472.jpg)
Caroline Rose: Loner
