Tagged: prematureevaluation

There's not a band in recent memory that nailed the landing quite like Sleigh Bells did in 2010 with Treats , their M.I.A.-cosigned debut. They were CMJ darlings back when being a CMJ darling was still sort of a thing, a Band To Watch , a band with so much expectation placed on them from the moment people knew who they were. By the time Sleigh Bells had hit marquee mags like The New Yorker ("It is hard to imagine anything stopping them," Sasha Frere-Jones wrote. "Unless they do something perverse like [...]

Name: Why? Progress Report: Yoni Wolf talks about the state of WHY? and the band's sometime-to-be-released new record. WHY? is one of those bands that will invariably cause you to sound like an asshole when you try and describe them. Hip-hop-inflected indie rock? Folk-hop? I'm gonna stop trying now. I will say, however, that the band's last two albums - 2008's Alopecia and 2009's Eskimo Snow - are some of the most wonderfully unclassifiable and fantastically witty pop albums of those years. Fans of the band have been waiting nearly [...]

To put all the waves upon waves of Lana Del Rey backlashes and frontlashes into proper perspective, let's all try a thought experiment: Imagine what might've happened if Fiona Apple, the closest cultural antecedent for LDR's first few singles, had emerged in the blanket-coverage internet age. Superficially, they're ridiculously similar. Both of them land a little too closely to the standards of beauty of their day. (Not to make light of eating disorders, but excessive skinniness was the '90s equivalent to lip injections.) Both are unsteady live presences; remember the noise surrounding Apple's Roseland meltdown? And both made [...]

The latest solo record from one-man four-track recorder Bradford Cox is probably his most accessible release under the moniker, striking a pretty even balance between the hazier Atlas Sound material as well and Cox's work in his more widely-known outfit Deerhunter. The songs on the record, for one, seem structurally tighter; songs like "Angel Is Broken" and "Lightworks" could easily fit on to Halcyon Digest ; " Modern Aquatic Nightsongs " itself is an off-kilter, seasick " Helicopter ." Moodier explorations like " Flagstaff " and " Terra Incognita " seems to revolve [...]

Lungs , Florence & The Machine's debut album, was a bit of a slow-burner; I don't think I quite realized how much I liked it until it had been out for nine months or so. By that time, of course, Florence Welch had achieved some sort of stealthy cultural omnipresence. She performed on SNL and at the VMAs, and "Dog Days Are Over" showed up in about a million commercials and TV trailers. It was almost like the entire universe decided that Lungs was a really good album around the same time I did. So it's [...]

First things first: There's no "D.A.N.C.E." on Justice's sophomore album. There's not really any "DVNO" either. Much of Justice's original popular appeal lay in their ability to craft these ridiculously catchy, instantly memorable fizzy dance tunes, and other than a vaguely sticky little vocal line on "Newlands," they've pretty much entirely left that behind now. Another side of the duo's early sound was the blaring in-the-red riff-dance banger: "Waters Of Nazareth," "Phantom," the aptly titled "Stress." Those snarling tracks are all gone, too. If you go into Audio, Video, Disco hoping for a specific thing that you got [...]

Noel Gallagher was the man who wrote virtually all the songs for Oasis, and sang a lot of the best ones. And even though the rest of the band took Liam's side during the contentious breakup, going off to form Beady Eye, Noel's solo debut has been the one that's caused the highest levels of anticipation. Even though Oasis fell the fuck off back when Bill Clinton was still in office, Noel always walked an interesting line between the lager-swilling lunkhead charm of his brother and the adventurous artistic soul of someone who could probably be doing better things if [...]

Every Björk album has some sort of overarching concept that also serves as an attention-grabbing hook - the Feminist World Warrior album, the A Capella album, the Sexy Bedtime IDM album. For an artist who's been in the game a long time, that's a canny approach; it keeps Björk from repeating herself, and it turns every album into a big new event. It also means that there's no fundamental Björk album, no one album that most encapsulates her sound. So her new album Biophilia is an interesting case in that the album's overarching concept is mostly an extramusical [...]

The Reminder , Feist's last album, blew the fuck up because it had a few good singles with great videos, because it showed up prominently in some commercials, and because it generally sounded just about perfect as a low-volume dinner-party soundtrack. That reads as extremely faint praise, but it's not; The Reminder was a perfectly charming low-key record that served a definite utilitarian purpose, and we need records like that. But it's still a bit of a surprise when Metals opens with "The Bad In Each Other," a pulsing, mythic post-blues lope that sounds something like [...]

To anyone on the Internet with even the slightest music nerd inclination, abstract Brooklyn rap group Das Racist has long been a giant, glowing orb to our mosquitolike existence; it was against our nature to avoid it. And, it's largely been a great experience - they've released a pair of wicked mixtapes , yukked it up like seasoned professionals and created some awesome videos . They even got into a duel with The New Yorker Cartoon Department , which is like, what? In his spare time, Himanshu Suri, [...]

Apparently, the appeal of a girl that looks an American Doll who also happens to create manic, spastic riffs is not lost on the people. Annie Clark's St. Vincent project has been universally admired and rhapsodized over ever since she sprung from Sufjan's Stevens' band (which also serves as some kind of songwriting academy ). Her second LP Actor earned high marks across the board , and her third, Strange Mercy will likely repeat that success. In case there were still doubters, she went ahead and covered Tom Waits [...]

Anthony Gonzalez has spent the better part of three years working on the grand, expansive double LP Hurry Up, We're Dreaming , and it shows. The new M83 album sounds incredible, and it sounds incredible in the sort of way that lets you know real work went into every single synth-plink in the album's 1.2 hours. Even in the odd moments when songs dissolve into fuzz as they end, that fuzz feels meticulously constructed; every sputter is in its right place. In interviews, Gonzalez has been saying that the album is basically every M83 album put together. [...]

For my money, Lil Wayne hit a crazy sustained peak in late 2005, when he released the great Tha Carter II , and he kept it going throughout 20062s barrage of mixtapes and stray tracks. It felt like a privilege to witness what was happening there: A rapper working at the genre's highest pop-cultural levels, finding new places to push his voice and actually letting the public hear these continuously mutating ideas. In the years since, no rapper has fired me up the way Wayne did during those months - not even Wayne himself. Whatever was animating him in [...]

Five years is a long time. The Rapture's last album, Pieces Of The People We Love , came out almost exactly five years ago, on the same day Justin Timberlake released FutureSex/LoveSounds . Pieces never found anything like the exalted reputation as Echoes , the band's previous album, but I loved the thing. Especially heard back-to-back with Timberlake's album, Pieces felt like some euphoric starry-eyed reawakening of the white-guy disco impulse. Pieces and FutureSex were beautifully crafted party albums, total love-letters to dance music, and it's [...]

On first listen, Beirut's third full-length, the first since 20072s The Flying Club Cup , glides by almost too easily. The more time you spend with it, though, the more it becomes clear The Rip Tide 's initial easy familiarity (and subsequent deepening) is a testament to Zach Condon's continued growth as a songwriter. He's able to deliver the calling-card Beirut people want (romantic croon, party-in-the-streets horn swells) while seamlessly mixing in new ingredients that showcase a purer pop feel coupled with a mature sense of restraint, all without sacrificing the "fun." [...]

Arctic Monkeys' James Ford-produced fourth album is consistent. "Consistency" on the Josh Homme-helmed Humbug at times equaled same-same doldrums, but on Suck It And See , the sustained "vibe" contributes to an overall ambiance and arc that remains interesting throughout. It's not all that difficult figuring out why: In this case, less proves more than more. The band's traded in Humbug 's layered, at times overburdened and fussy production (e.g. "cue the psychedelic choir!") for a simpler, lighter sound, one that offers more space to showcase, unfettered, the nuances of Alex Turner & Co's growth as [...]

From those three months alone in a Wisconsin cabin to sharing a stage with collaborator Kanye West , Justin Vernon's traveled far on the back of his angelic falsetto. When he self-released For Emma, Forever Ago in 2007 he probably didn't expect Peter Gabriel to cover "Flume" a couple years later. Or to have West sampling material from 2009's brief Blood Bank EP for his epic My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy . Speaking of which, it turns out Blood Bank 's Auto-Tuned closer "Woods," the one that caught [...]

From those three months alone in a Wisconsin cabin to sharing a stage with collaborator Kanye West , Justin Vernon's traveled far on the back of his angelic falsetto. When he self-released For Emma, Forever Ago in 2007 he probably didn't expect Peter Gabriel to cover "Flume" a couple years later. Or to have West sampling material from 20092s brief Blood Bank EP for his epic My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy . Speaking of which, it turns out Blood Bank 's Auto-Tuned closer "Woods," the one that caught [...]

My Morning Jacket's popularity has exploded over the last few years: See, for instance, their Madison Square Garden New Year's appearance in 2009, guest spot on American Dad , and week-long residency at Terminal 5 in 2010. All of this even though, depending on who you ask, the band's never matched It Still Moves or Z . That said, Circuital - a more consistent and enjoyable experience than Evil Urges - is a step in the right direction. Read More...

It's hard to say if the term "chillwave" actually means anything. In the age of countless one-person bands with oceans on their MySpaces, the term's been applied to just about anybody chipping away at a hazy, nostalgic bedroom style, a style that appeared easy enough to replicate, received a ton of attention fast, has helped create dozens of forgettable dorm-recordists. Thing is, even the most creatively bankrupt or deadlocked aesthetics usually include rare birds, musicians able to move beyond common denominators and create something personal, even exciting. As far as "chillwave" goes, it's been Toro Y Moi and Neon Indian. [...]