A megapiece on five records that managed to stir something more than just 200 words of written soundbyte reviews. Other records did this too, but these five did it best. And I’m just here to struggle and starve and write to them.
Casual rambles, short stories and poetry done casually
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Self-love is my greatest struggle, by virtue of an extreme aversion to any patterned pitfalls of narcissistic behavior that, inevitably, a person will fall into, but an imbalance on the bell curve of the spectrum meets at the point of insidiousness: believe too strongly in yourself and risk perspective, criticize yourself too thoroughly and risk pleasure.
Lemme tell ya: nobody does revolution like the French.
A Song is a City asks only one question: how hard do you want to belong?
“I was this close,” I said, suddenly, interrupting my own train of thought, raising two hands with about of foot of air between them, “to finishing an outline on the damn thing.” But then I thought, if Eskimo Joe only needed deliver halfway on this Girl, then that hands me carte blanche on how to review the damn thing.
Kurt Vile, a vinyl-pressed halo, what a dude, what a goober, he’s a street angel, probably spent his early day hustling the corners, scouting for the best street angles.
The phenomenal instrumentation and musicianship plays into a Bangsian motto of “the grimier, the rockier, the better” and they make that idiomatic approach tick on the every part of their sophomore effort while still allowing for more long-form melodic, harmonic and rhythmic skill.
You have no idea how ready I was to destroy this record.
In the past year, I’ve caught an increasing amount of concerts—20, in fact. A decent count, but it neither gives me any right brag, nor any excuse not to have earplugs. The sum isn’t off the wall amazing, but it is a roughly 2000% increase of my concerts-per-annum rate naught but four years ago. In […]
If there was a long-game to be played on this record, this was it—toying with a Miles Davis line of seemingly nonsensical sonic experimentation until finding that miracle place of otherworldly sound and space.
The Casual Ramble 