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,…
Here’s a list of major new releases for the week of January 26, 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.
As you also may have already seen, we are currently accepting applications for the roles of staff reviewer and contributing reviewer. If you think you have what it takes, apply here. The tentative deadline is this Sunday, 1/28.
– Full List of Releases: January 26, 2018 –
Calexico: The Thread That Keeps Us
Genre: Country/Americana/Folk // Label: Anti/Epitaph
In keeping with the monthly (bi-monthly, if proper motivation and inspiration manages to come my way) ramblings that I regularly undertake – whether it be by a long-winded review, incoherent comment in some guy’s thread about Sputnik’s flavor-of-the-month album, or the now-immortal quip “list is digs” that is said to be bestowed upon a many lists, threads, and articles – I have seen it appropriate to further expand the ongoing Guides series, starting with a bi-monthly retrospective on the one and only David Bowie: the man of many faces, sounds, and visions.
No introduction is needed for such an astounding artist, but for those who do need a refresher, Bowie did a lot throughout his 54 years in the industry (1962-2016), beginning as a young man heavily influenced by the rhythm and blues very much popular with British youth and emerging decades later weathered through a multitude of personae, fashions, and most importantly, the stardom he desired so greatly and the acclaim that followed. Once a young man who dreamed of being his band’s Mick Jagger and inspired by the whimsical music hall sound of Anthony Newley (who reportedly destroyed his copy of Bowie’s debut in disgust) during his time with Decca (1966-1968), he went out as perhaps the definitive artist of his generation and as one of the most innovative pop artists ever.
Now that we’ve a little context behind the man who wrote classics such as “Heroes”,…
This is going to be the first in a series of staff on staff interviews. I’ve been brainstorming ideas on how to grow the site, and bring new traffic in, and I thought there’s no better way to achieve that than to do a circlejerk staff on staff kind of thing that is going to be of no interest to anyone not already very familiar with Sputnikmusic.com. Anyway, here’s my interview with JohnnyOnTheSpot.
*(Signifies post-interview footnotes).
—————–
Treb: all right let’s do this. Hard hitting questions first. What’s it like having two first names?*
*(question regarding Tristan’s real name context which is lost because he uses an alias on Sputnikmusic.com).
Tristan: I wasn’t aware “Jones” was a first name used by anyone.
I didn’t actually know your last name.* Were you always JohnnyOnTheSpot on sput? Or did you ever get a name change/use a different profile?
*(Me completely missing the fact that Tristan is referring to his online handle versus his real name).
I’ve existed in/around the site prior to that profile but that was the first/only profile I created that I used to any extent, beyond maybe rating a bunch of stuff in 2008-2009(?)*
*(Tristan’s official join date is 2012. I’ll get to the bottom of this if I ever do a follow up interview.)
How did you first hear about Sputnik? I remember for me, I was a big Wikipedia head, and I would read about almost every album I listened to, and I started to see Sputnikmusic…
Hello fellow aggregators, and welcome to a celebration of teamwork with data. Rob Mitchum is one such aggregator, and for the past 5 years he has been putting together a spreadsheet per year of all the top 50 AOTY lists released by reputable publications. For this post I did something I don’t normally do, and that’s ask permission to use data, specifically that spreadsheet.
More information can be found on his page, but, essentially, Rob finds all the lists he deems worthy and handscores their ranks into a google sheet. From there, he calculates the average rank for each album (the AVG column), the average rank divided by the number of appearances (WT-AVG column), and a consensus score (CONS SCORE column) which is the average rank of the lists if every non-appearance was given a rank of 75 (an album is thus penalized for every publication ranking it doesn’t appear on). The albums are sorted by that final consensus score and as of January 11, 2018 (which is when I downloaded the data) Kendrick’s Damn. currently stands at number 1.
This very site right here released its own set of end of year album lists so I thought it would be cool to compare our own lists to the individual publications and consensus score rankings. To accomplish this I grabbed the staff top 50 list, the user voted top 50 list, and the rating-based user-usage adjusted top 50 from my year-end rankings post. It wasn’t entirely seamless, I had to…
An astoundingly large portion of Pink Floyd’s back catalogue was unceremoniously released into the world in 2016. When I say ‘unceremoniously’, I mean a lavish multi-disc, Blu-ray and DVD boxset which extensively covered their first seven years of life; but when you consider this music one of life’s finer pleasures and these rarities as basically a wellspring of lost gold, the boxset feels a lot less than they deserved. In fact, the not-insignificant price tag of The Early Years would have undoubtedly turned some fans off from digging into material that should be in everyone’s collection.
I mean, just try some out for size – like the brilliantly loopy lost Syd Barrett cuts “Vegetable Man” and “Scream Thy Last Scream”. The former features some of the band’s all-time catchiest melodies against a disturbingly self-reflective lyric from Syd, reportedly blocked from A Saucerful of Secrets for being “too dark”, while the latter boasts Nick Mason belting out a rare lead vocal of surreal rhymes over chipmunk backing vocals ripped straight from your nightmares. Or maybe the half-hour long “John Latham” jam, an extended improvisational soundtrack to an early piece of British surrealism that makes “Interstellar Overdrive” sound pretty tame. Or, moving past the Syd years, you have The Man and the Journey, a legendary live show that combined musique concrete, pastoral folk and explosive psychedelia as the band tried to re-jig songs from their first four albums into an impressionistic concept piece involving pink jungles and temples of light. There are diamonds on…
