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…
There’s little sentimental to be had about “Spotlight,” because throughout his career, Lil Peep has always sounded like this; awash in syrupy, Xanax-fuelled haze, doing his best to sound just like Blink 182’s Blink 182. The same goes for Marshmello, whose “Wolves” and “Silence” rise and fall in similar fashion to the production delivered here, churning up some of Peep’s emo and pop punk instrumentals and giving them a muted, subtly anthemic undercurrent. It’s probably the closest Peep had come to a pop single before his passing, and its why the song’s opening declaration, that, ‘this time, I’ll be on my own, my friend / One more time, I’m all alone again,’ is ever so slightly more potent. Yes, Peep could be making a farewell, but he’s also saying everything he has already said before, succinctly, and better.
So, chalk it up to kismet or chalk it up to progression, there’s a lot about “Spotlight” that sounds like just another long wave goodbye. There are prophetical lines, and there are clichéd cries for love; there’s a constant, droning melody, and there’s a big, power ballad of a chorus, too. And in between, Peep’s lines never sound uncharacteristic, particularly his drearily declaring that he’s ‘faded,’ or that he’s, ‘all alone again.’ This was and always will be the public image of Lil Peep: a miserable 21-year old, battling with sobriety and dependency, motivated by little other than a desire to feel something, whatever that something might be. At junctures, it could sound empty, and…
Here’s a list of major new releases for the week of January 19, 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.
Belle & Sebastian: How To Solve Our Human Problems Pt. 2
Genre: Indie-Pop/Rock // Label: Matador
Background:
The second in a three-part EP series, How To Solve Our Human Problems Pt. 2 will look to expand upon the sleek indie-pop/electronic offering of the first installment. The band arguably reached a handful of personal heights on Pt. 1, especially creatively and in terms of production value, so there is reason to anticipate continued excellence throughout the trilogy. You can hear the lead single from Pt. 2 below.
“I’ll be Your Pilot”:
– Full List of Releases: January 19, 2018 –
A Grave with No Name: Passover
Genre: Indie-Folk // Label: LForged Artifacts
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Arkona: Khram
Genre: Black Metal // Label: Napalm
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Bahamas: Earthtones
Genre: Alternative Rock // Label: Brushfire/Universal
Let’s just forget for a moment that the Collector’s Edition of DAMN. ever happened. OK, is it out of your minds? Good. Now let’s also for a moment ignore the nearly invisible thread of a thematic composition, as it’s really the drops of blood that fall from Kendrick’s mouth throughout the record that help illuminate this thin string. It’s true, Kendrick embraces his own death and almost enjoys the metallic taste that society has caused to pool in his mouth. And damn if he doesn’t lash out right away with “DNA.”, easily the banger of the year solidified by the fervent extra verse that ends the track with silent mouths agape. Despite “HUMBLE.” also taking from the leftover rush of endorphins, Kendrick decides to expand off of his jazz rap endeavor, this time with a rosy filter of R&B rap and laid-back vibes. “ELEMENT.” is the front-runner when it comes to such a trial, with Rihanna-featured “LOYALTY.” coming close behind. While not every love-drenched track succeeds quite as much as the two, it’s hard to argue against this next logical step in Kendrick’s style and sound.
I’ll be completely honest, though, I’m not the biggest fan of this album as a whole. Don’t get me wrong, the product in its entirety is put together quite nicely, nonetheless tacked on with some buttons of…
While not necessarily offering much in new material, The Wonder Years manage to affirm their intentions with this emotionally wrought collection of beautifully arranged acoustic renditions of previous material. Dan Campbell’s vocals ring as self-assured and vibrant as ever, and the band’s instrumentation adds many more colors to the pallet already established by the track listing. The production is intimate and the emotional tension is high on Burst and Decay, and The Wonder Years managed to create a nice batch of acoustic arrangements that arguably outshine their original renditions. –ianblxdsoe
Baseball is my favorite sport, so when it comes to the end of the year and evaluating its yield, I like the idea of tidying up my thoughts in terms of individual contributions. For a team sport, baseball’s modern era permits (nay, encourages) an insane degree of focus on individual performance and contributions (and there is a litany of statistics to this effect). It’s a weird analogue to draw, for sure, but it is super clear to me that Charli XCX is the 2017 MVP. Like DAMN, talk about output… there were the twin mixtapes (this one, as well as Pop2, both of…
Here’s a list of major new releases for the week of January 12, 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.
Camila Cabello: Camila
Genre: Pop // Label: Syco/Epic
Background:
Leaving Fifth Harmony to pursue a solo career, Camila Cabello has found early success with her chart-topping ‘Havana.’ Camila may not be the most riveting album to kick off our 2018, but it’s sure to be a talked about (and almost certainly overplayed) pop outing that could set Ms. Cabello up for a a lot of mainstream success in the coming years. As a debut, Camila already appears to be positioned as one of 2018’s biggest pop albums. If you’ve managed to live under a rock for the last several months, you can hear her extremely successful single below.
“Havana”:
– Full List of Releases: January 12, 2018 –
Anderson East: Encore
Genre: Country/Americana/Soul // Label: Low Country Sound/Elektra
It feels weird to be kicking off our best of the year list with async. After all, the opener “Andata” is the sort of song associated with endings; it’s a funeral dirge, a reflection of where Sakamoto’s mind was no doubt wandering during his three year battle with cancer. Perhaps this fear of death also led to the common day sounds present throughout async. The first words spoken on the album (“Because we don’t know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times”) is the sentiment that I think sums up the importance of these sounds we take for granted, yet may never hear again. “Walker”, for example, features the sound of grass crunched underfoot and the background noise of a town or city in the distance, provoking the sort of quiet contemplation that no doubt Sakamoto experienced while crafting async. But if most of async is the quiet reflection that comes with the reminder of one’s mortality, then the title track is the sweating painful fear that comes with all the pangs and doubts as to whether remission will come. And for that complex duality, I think async deserves a spot here. –Mort.
Imagine the heart-wrenching emotional reach of a track like “Colly Strings”, only blasted through the sleek production of an album like Simple Math. This is Manchester Orchestra in peak form. –Sowing
(24) Lorde – “Hard Feelings/Loveless”
Melodrama
2017 was the year of our Lorde, and she created one of the most captivating art-pop albums of the millennium. “Hard Feelings/Loveless” unravels in gorgeous fashion, evolving from the heartbroken laments of lost love to a sassy, fuck you of a little jingle. –Sowing
(23) Cairo Knife Fight – “A-Six”
Seven
A scorcher that balances groovy choruses with moody verses. As sharp sound scapes wrap around the buzzing guitars, the passionate, wide ranged vocals rip throughout the track with powerful hooks. –Raul Stanciu
(22) JASSS – “Every Single Fish In The Pond”
Weightless
Few artists can so seamlessly blend tribal base layers with industrial climax like JASSS. This is the sound of a civilization’s evolution from its eventual rise to its peak, envisioned in a nightclub, suspended in time. –Tristan Jones
Hello budding data viz lovers, and welcome to a post that will put the division in Joy Division. When it’s time to explain patterns and numbers to layman, it’s usually done with the help of a graphic of some sort. Why? Because numbers are abstract and visual aids are useful tools to make the abstract concrete. But perhaps, too, it has another quality.
A great genre of argument is the “this seemingly boring and mundane activity is actually an art and full of wonders”. It’s a hit because it’s always true. We humans will assign meaning to anything we spend any amount of time doing. Anything and everything has some great novel/film/etc. about it and it has a r/ page full of memes. So data and statistics are no different. There’s r/DataIsBeauitful, some Neal Stephenson novels, and Moneyball. Without rethinking baseball management, scouting, and talent evaluation via the aid of analytics; how else would Brad Pitt have reconnected with his daughter (or gained a pioneer/icon status that has let him keep his job for so long despite little success)?
Data visualization bridges the gap from something that is obviously artistic, making visual images, to something that is only an art if you explain it, working with data. Thus, data visualization is an art in and of itself, and it’s something that is treated with care and respect in order to enrich the mundane into something full of meaning and import. And since people that work in data visualization can be…
