rolling really good music reviews (not necessarily positive)

lol

think xgau got away with this one really well:

What I admire most and enjoy most about this album is that it addresses African-Americans straight up and leaves the rest of the hip-hop audience to listen in if it wants. It’s a strong, brave, effective bid to reinstate hip-hop as black America’s CNN — more as op-ed than front page, but in the Age of Twitter that’s the hole that needs filling. Fortunately, the concept starts with the music, which eschews party bangers without foregoing groove, sampling rhythm godfathers P-Funk, Michael Jackson, and the Isley Brothers and building a house band around jazz pianist Robert Glasper and what-you-got bassist Thundercat. But it’s even more racially explicit in lyrics that don’t protest racism because what good does that ever do — just assumes it as a condition of life for his people, root cause of the cultural breakdowns he laments and preaches against throughout. Acknowledged only in passing is a mega-success too obvious to go on about, not to mention enjoy — a privilege that’s also a temptation, to which he responds not with hater paranoia but with a depressive anxiety that resurfaces as a narrative hook without ever starting a pity party. Lamar knows he’s got it good. For his people he wants better. Few musicians of any stylistic persuasion are so thoughtful or so ardent. Few musicians have so little need of a hooky review. A MINUS

https://medium.com/cuepoint/robert-christgau-expert-witness-9fa87a06ebde#.7du11g1l8

Neil Young's Tonight's the Night is a harrowing record about loss and death. Yet it often sounds like a raucous party thrown by a bunch of lovable knuckleheads having the time of their life.

http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22053-tonights-the-night/
Mark Richardson always doing good stuff

Tonight’s the Night is an album not so much about death as about mourning. And while we might like to think of mourning as a dignified pursuit grounded in ritual—a black veil, food at the door, loved ones at beck and call—the truth is that mourning can be messy and out of control and it can sometimes look like something else entirely. Sometimes mourning can even look like a macabre celebration, embracing life with one arm while the black figure of death is curled inside the other.

this one is great:

https://www.villagevoice.com/2017/07/25/arcade-fire-cant-dance-and-thats-a-problem/

Really enjoyed this takedown of Public Service Broadcasting's latest... offering

http://thequietus.com/articles/22774-public-service-broadcasting-every-valley-review

Since it confirms everything that I hate about this shit

this is a good review
https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bob-dylan-trouble-no-more-the-bootleg-series-vol-13-1979-1981/

five responses by 2017

― on entre O.K. on sort K.O. (man alive), Wednesday, December 30, 2015 11:41 AM (one year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lmao though

haha yeah

Mark Richardson is still a v good writer

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-war-on-drugs-a-deeper-understanding/

So yes, Springsteen, Dylan, Tom Petty, and Neil Young all made songs between 1983 and 1988 that sounded something like the War on Drugs, but they often had these booming gated drums, a technique Granduciel mostly avoids. Instead, he favors a steady, muted pulse evocative of krautrock’s motorik groove. The arrangement of “In Chains” hums and explodes but the drums plow ahead with barely a fill or an accent, precisely marking the passing time. The approach to rhythm highlights the glide of the arrangement, creating a long rope of sound bound together so tightly it could never be pulled apart.

here's a good one from John Bush at Allmusic:

In 1962, flush with the success of Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music, Ray Charles signed one of his favorite singers, Little Jimmy Scott, to his Tangerine label with the purpose of supervising an album of ballads. He hired a pair of genial arrangers, Gerald Wilson and Marty Paich (both of whom had recently written charts for Charles), and requested them to aim for the soft strings and muted horns of classic Frank Sinatra performances recorded with ballad masters Axel Stordahl or Gordon Jenkins. With Charles himself offering sensitive interplay on his piano, Falling in Love Is Wonderful is Scott's best single LP -- charming in its earnest feeling, deeply pained as a set of torch songs -- and ranks with his "Everybody Plays the Fool" single as the best work of his career. Nothing here gets in the way of Scott's pure, angelic voice; he captures, like none other than Sinatra himself, a range of love-struck emotions, from the sheepish depression of "Why Try to Change Me" to the restrained hopefulness of "Someone to Watch Over Me." He's in the best voice of his career, holding his tight vibrato perfectly for as long as needed and making either his high or low register sound like the only natural choice on every occasion. In one of the great tragedies of recorded music, however, his former boss, Herman Lubinsky of Savoy, claimed that he still owned Scott's contract, and under threat of legal suit, the record was removed from the shelves less than a month after release. A prime collector's item for over 40 years, Falling in Love Is Wonderful finally earned a limited re-release in 2003 thanks to the boutique label Rhino Handmade.

old but gold, as they say