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REVIEW: FKA twigs Magdalene
Since the early 2010’s, the artist known as FKA twigs has been stretching the limits of pop and R&B through a bizarre production style that is entirely unique to her, making her one of the most interesting and consistent figures in music at the moment. Her 2014 debut, titled LP 1, is a mind-bending album of glitchy, weird and warped R&B, but she really came into her own on 2015’s dark and harrowing M3LL155X EP. And then she went dark for four years, sparking endless online speculation about the reasons for her silence. In the spring of 2018, the […]
BEING THERE: GBV @ Underground Arts
Photo by JOSH PELTA-HELLER In a New York Times piece about birding published a few years back, author Brian Kimberling observed insightfully that making a list of bird species identified on any particular day, as birdwatchers do, is “a form of prayer, a thanksgiving for being alive at a certain time and place.” And posting that list online, he went on, “is a 21st-century form of a votive offering.” Concert setlists are arguably no different. Created by a band to serve the practical purpose of coordinating each member’s participation in the show that night, the paper on which they’re written […]
BEING THERE: Lightning Bolt @ Union Transfer
Photo by DYLAN JARED LONG Lightning Bolt’s band name may be a visual representation of their sound. Other band names that could have been a good fit for the noise rock duo are – hold on, let me scroll through my list here – Total Lunatics™ or perhaps Fuck Rocket™. Unassociated recording engineer Steve Albini called one of their live performances the “best alarm clock [he’s] ever had” when they played on the doorstep of his neighbor John Peel’s house. Yes, the John Peel. Lightning Bolt formed in college at Rhode Island School of Design in ’94. Drummer/vocalist Brian Chippendale […]
REVIEW: Beck Hyperspace
“Everything I do, you know I don’t do right” Beck sings on ‘Uneventful Days’ from the just-out Hyperspace, and boy is that an apt description of his musical output in the past few years. Hyperspace, like 2017’s highly forgettable Colors, is disgustingly safe and has little to distinguish it from any other collection of samey wanna-be top 40 pop radio hits other than brand name recognition. It really makes you wonder when the last time a Beck album warranted excitement. Odelay or Mellow Gold are modern classics but they came out almost a quarter century ago. Sure, he made […]
WORTH REPEATING: Smells Like Treason
ROLLING STONE: America once used the words “treason” and “traitors” only in cases of actual betrayal of our nation’s most vital secrets or interests. They were profound words, deep with meaning, grim in import, carrying with them the knowledge that the penalty for treason was death. Be honest: The words “traitor” and “treason” don’t have the sting they once had; they’ve been devalued from mis- and over-use by this president. For Donald Trump, any opposition, either personal, ideological, or political is treason. Anyone who stands in his path betrays the Great Leader. Anyone who fails to take the knee is a traitor. […]
BEING THERE: Phish @ The Met
Photo by Kevin Mazur for Getty/SiriusXM Beyond the givens when seeing Phish— long improvisational grooves, setlist gags, middle-aged fans huffing Hippy Crack after the show, and the day-after ache in my legs from three hours of channeling my dance moves from the spirit of Vincent Vega— no one knows what to expect from a Phish show, and anyone tells you otherwise is a liar. There was a little bit of online controversy surrounding their show at The Met last night. Because the concert was a SiriusXM promotional event, no tickets were put on sale for the general public. Instead, tickets […]
BOOK REVIEW: And Shit Yeah It’s Cool!
BY JON HOULON Indie rock. I never understood that. Independent of what? Commerce? I doubt it. Your Drag City is the Capitol of a state called Filthy Lucre. Songs? Yea, could be. I heard Tom Russell – one of the finest #OKboomer songwriters still plying his trade – say that the trouble with indie kids is that they don’t write songs but, rather, “soundscapes.” Ever try playing a Pavement ditty around a campfire? It falls flat. And, lord knows, don’t sing DCB over roasted marshmallows unless you want your pals propelled into a fiery furnace. My best guess is […]
Win Tix To See She & Him @ The Met Wednesday!
Zooey Deschanel — with her big baby blue doe-in-the-headlights, her kicky Bridgette Bardot ‘do, and her unsinkable cheerfulness — is like the impossibly cute, eternally quirky, thrift store retro-cool girlfriend every soon-to-be art school drop-out wanted to blow off the prom with. She’s one of those people that walk between the raindrops tittering over the same private joke she’s been cracking herself up with for years but tells to no one. M. Ward, with his George Shearing tea shades, his Cheshire grin of a voice, and his impeccable curation of shimmering mid-20th Century ephemera, is that art school drop […]
CINEMA: Murder On The Bourgeois Express
KNIVES OUT (directed by Rian Johnson, 130 minutes, USA, 2019) BY DAN TABOR The whodunnit murder mystery is a genre that’s kind of faded into obscurity over the years. It’s probably because audiences are a lot savvier when it comes this genre’s patented plot twist denouement reveal, making this one of the more difficult genres to pull off effectively in the age of social media. Be that as it may, Rian Johnson’s Knives Out is a brilliant love letter to the drawing room sleuthing of the likes of Agatha Christie and Ellery Queen, and easily one of the best films […]
HOT FREAK: Q&A w/ Philly’s Own Alex G
Photo by DYLAN LONG BY JONATHAN VALANIA Alex G, aka Alex Giannascoli, is like the red-eyed unshaven love child of Olivia Tremor Control and the Beta Band drunk on early Iron and Wine, Portland-era Elliott Smith and Guided By Voices circa Vampire On Titus: pretty/sad zig-zag bedsit folk-pop chopped and screwed until blissed out and chimerical. Born and raised on the mean streets of Havertown, an inner ring suburb of Philadelphia, and bottle-fed on the mid-90s’ indie-rock of his big sister’s record collection, he started making his own music on Garageband at the tender age of 15 and pumping it […]
INCOMING: Vengeance Will Be Thine
RELATED: The 90s were a helluva drug. You really had to be there, kid, but suffice it to say it was 10 years of unprecedented peace and prosperity, a pot in every chicken, 2.5 SUVs in every garage, a Clinton was president and Donald Trump ran beauty contests instead of the free world. In the 90s, the Internet went public and we all become tech stock billionaires overnight — all of us — selling dog bones over the World Wide Web, which was what we called the Interwebs back then, as was the style of the day. Good. Times. […]
CINEMA: The Kid And The Wail
MARRIAGE STORY (directed by Noah Baumbach, 136 minutes, USA, 2019) BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC Marriage Story, written and directed by Noah Baumbach, begins at the tail end of Charlie (Adam Driver) and Nicole’s (Scarlett Johansson) union with the pair unsuccessfully attempting divorce mediation. Nicole who once had a successful film career in LA, moved to New York where she fell in love with Charlie. Soon married, the pair worked together in the New York theater scene with Charlie writing/directing and Nicole as his wife, muse and lead, not to mention the mother of their son. A profile in Brooklyn […]