New Music: Disco Polo

          

Basia Bulat shares "Disco Polo," the third single from her new album Basia's Palace, out February 21st. A folk song named for a genre of Polish dance music beloved by her late father, the track honors the dichotomy of Bulat's musical inheritance from him and her mother. About the song, the artist comment: "This is an homage to what I feel like is the two sides of my musical lineage–my mother was a classically trained piano and guitar teacher, and my father’s favourite genre was Disco Polo. About the only thing we could all agree on was the oldies radio station that was the peacemaker of our home when I was a child. I wanted to write something that felt like a folk tale about those genres and how they still influence me after all this time–even now every time I sit down at the piano all those different musical worlds swirl around each other and try to dance together in my mind. The dancers of the video are Louise Bédard, Diane Carrière, and Louise Lussier and is directed by Nora Rosenthal

Rocktrospectiva: The Acclaimed "No Cities To Love" Turns 10

Released on 20 January, 2025, "No Cities To Love" was the 8th., studio album by American rock band Sleater-Kinney, the album received universal acclaim from music critics spawning two singles "Bury Our Friends" and "A New Wave". 

 

Considered their 8th., studio album and the wiser, the album is a disarming, liberationist force befitting the Sleater-Kinney canon. The necessity of change the creative virtue of ripping it up and starting again—remains a crucial strand of Sleater-Kinney's DNA. This is still the classic band sound: low-tuned classic rock tropes resuscitated with punk urgency, raw and jagged. 

 

Weiss' massive swoop is still the band's throbbing heart, pumping Sleater-Kinney's blood. But Brownstein has said they set out to find "a new approach to the band" and that is true of No Cities to Love. It is no less emphatic and corporeal than their punk classics Call the Doctor and Dig Me Out. But unlike their last two albums of monstrous combat rock, No Cities to Love keeps only the most addictive elements. Catchy as all-clashing hell, it's Sleater-Kinney's most front-to-back accessible album, amping their omnipresent love of new wave pop with aerodynamic choruses that reel and reel, enormously shouted and gasped and sung with a dead-cool drawl. 

 

The album had the particular aliveness of music being created and torn from a group at this very moment—tempered, but with the wild-paced abandon that comes with being caged and then free ever, empathy is Sleater-Kinney's renewable energy source. They have always made a kind of folk music—songs of real people—and opener "Price Tag" is an honest example of this, fueled by Tucker's motherly responsibility. In concrete detail, it describes the struggle of a working class family in the context of American capitalism and financial crisis. Real life power dynamics permeate No Cities, among the rubbery synth lines of the otherwise venomous "Fangless" and the anxious post-hardcore lurch of "No Anthems". On the glammy "Gimme Love", Tucker plainly wants more of that four-letter-word for girls and outsiders.

 

Sleater-Kinney began work on the album in earnest around May 2012, they have said, but especially on the anthemic title track and "Hey Darling"—the first two songs they wrote—you can hear echoes of that decade of pause, an airing out of just why. The titular phrase is abstract enough, but considering Brownstein's vocal incompatibility with the van-show-van-show tour-life void—and her lines, here, about "a ritual of emptiness"—it plays like a direct take on the complicated reality of the rootless rock band and its scattered tribe. On "Hey Darling", one of Tucker's gummiest melodies becomes a letter to fans, reasoning her hiding: "It seems to me the only thing/ That comes from fame is mediocrity," and then, "Sometimes the shout of the room/ Makes me feel so alone." The slow-burn of "Fade", the closer, also takes on Sleater-Kinney's hiatus. Tucker is like a Robert Plant putting her supernatural quasi-operatic range on display over epic, minor-key hard rock, switching from sly-voiced ballad to high-pitched inflection. 

 

Sleater-Kinney's discography is full of songs delivering meta-commentaries on what it means to be women playing rock; The album is more purely personal and explicitly political, evidence enough that in the context of family, middle-age, and multiple careers, it is possible to have everything. For the first time in 21 years, Sleater-Kinney finally had written an album without a proper stomach-twisting tearjerker; no wistful confessions, breathless breakups, or dying lovers.

 

No Cities to Love gained widespread critical acclaim. Certain critics called the album a truly outstanding rock and roll album and the very first finest of that 2015, their best record in their entire career, and pretty much the most perfect comeback in recent years for them, and emotive album full of raging post-punk collection tracks and a jewel in their legacy.

 

No Cities To Love Track List:

 

1. Price Tag

2. Fangless

3. Surface Envy

4. No Cities To Love

5. A New Wave

6. No Anthems

7. Gimme Love

8. Bury Our Friends

9. Hey Darling

10. Fade

Rocktrospectiva: The Charming "Been Around" Turns 5

 

Released on 20 January 2020, "Been Around" was the 4th., studio album by U.S. artist Erin Moran, breaking the silence two years later of her last released "The Last Detail", the album spawned two singles "Someone's Gonna Break Your Heart" & "Finest Actor". 

 

An interesting album since the beginning when the opener "Been Around" noticed her skills to create fancy and elegant songs with a certai soft rock, beautiful brass arrangements that gave the track a soulful touch, the intimate "Big Mouth" came next, "Jody" is pure joy and a certain Steely Dan style, but the brilliant "Someone's Goona Break Your Heart" was the hit, you can notice a certain britpop and The Pretenders style, a catchy track and the finest from the set, what about the top soul vibes noticed on "Comte To The Palisades!", a hapsichord evocatinga delicate Hollywood vibe on "Finest Actor", "Two Hearts" was nice and expansive, and her touching hommage and memoir to her late father in "Lucky Jack (20-1)".

 

Definitely this was her biggest step back then, a game changer on her career, a justified sound for the New Jersey native now stablished in the UK, actually she never went away, always been there, playing live sets and delivering interesting albums such as this. 

 

Been Around Track List: 

 

1. Been Around

2. Big Mouth

3. Jody

4. Charity Shop Window

5. Someone's Gonna Break Your Heart

6. Not That Sentimental Anymore

7. Two Hearts

8. Lucky  Jack (20-1)

9. Come To The Palisades!

10. Finest Actor

11. NY Man

12. Pale Blue Moon

Rocktrospectiva: The Exciting And Noisy "Viet Cong" Turns 10

Released on 20 January 2015, "Viet Cong" is the debut studio album by Canadian rock band Viet Cong. Is the only album released by the band under this name, as they changed their name to Preoccupations in 2016.The album spawned three singles "Continental Shelf", "Bunker Buster" & "Silhouettes".

In their debut record Viet Cong, which turns 10 today, the band now known as Preoccupations root around in the uncertainty of our obliteration. The Calgary post-punk band have always existed as translators of a sonic past and interpreters of the present moment, building from forebears like This Heat and Joy Division for an apocalypse entirely of their own era. Call it weaponized nostalgia, if you must. I choose to see it as violent distortion, a shifting of angles and sharpness to fit new wreckage. they sought to sketch out untapped darkness for a new generation of post-punk.

Viet Cong is one of the most significant records of the 2010s for me. It’s certainly among the best of the best when it came to that decade’s crop of post-punk revivalists, of which there was no short supply. With only seven tracks and a fairly short runtime, it bombards you with the full force of its might and gets out before the shellshock sets in. It’s simultaneously compact and sprawling, expansive and suffocating, panicked and pleading for some form of peace.

The booming thuds of “Newspaper Spoons” are a gripping decimation march, and that’s before Matt Flegel’s blaring howls enter. The record’s first words could double as a bird’s eye view of the album as a whole: “Writhing violence/ Essentially without distortion.” When Munro and Christiansen’s guitars enter, they exist less as lead and rhythm, and more like bloodthirsty animals fighting one another, snaking and stabbing around each other in dissonant tones. The track is like an unflinching snapshot of unspeakable horrors, even if the horrors themselves are never explicitly named.

This is where one of Viet Cong’s greatest graces in aging comes. While it’s not impossible to make good post-punk that’s undeniably specific about contemporary affairs, Viet Cong’s refusal to offer easy reference points creates a striking contextual negative space to its lyrics, one that plays a huge role in the endurance of its sentiments. The names and faces of those wreaking violence may change, but the root causes still remain the same. "What side are you on, man?”"Flegel exclaims at the height of "Bunker Buster," caustically exposing the shallowness of this antagonistic rhetoric, before lobbing another provocative jab of xenophobia at the unseen target: “I know eventually you’ll tell me where you came from.” And that’s often what the lyricism on Viet Cong sounds like: tilting the hostility of the modern sociopolitical world to such extremes that it exposes the ridiculousness underneath, without undercutting the very tangible threats that hostility represents.

There’s none of that ridiculousness to be found, however, whenever Preoccupations lock themselves into a groove for several measures on end. In the hypnotic, pummeling instrumental passages of "March Of Progress" and "Death," Preoccupations stumble onto a different kind of poignance, capturing the tangible uncertainty that comes with living at the whims of a global death machine. In revisiting Viet Cong over the years, these spans have taken on the effect of reflecting pools, blank slates for me to project onto whatever unresolved geopolitical tensions plague my mind. In 2015, when the record first came out, it was the unknowability of the political landscape ahead, the inability to see what was coming just over that year’s horizon. In 2020, it became an arresting fear of pandemic, of how much unfamiliar disease would ravage the human race. When I revisit Viet Cong now and spend over two full minutes losing myself in the looping drum barrage of "March of Progress," or the doomy crashes in the middle of “Death,” I still find myself anxious. I know how many measures lay ahead of me in the song, but the feeling envelops me in such totality that it may as well last forever. I’ve sensed the emotion it makes me feel my entire adult life. I may as well be feeling it the rest of my lifetime.

And then you have "Continental Shelf" and "Silhouettes" as the pieces that bring an immediate jolt to Side B and drive the record home. "Continental Shelf," in particular, has the kind of melody that feels almost evergreen, like something that’s been part of post-punk’s subconscious songwriting lexicon for years before being committed to record. I love the way its first verse takes great patience to build, its instrumental emphasis shifting as its heft grows and grows — Wallace’s snare hits sounding like firing squad shots, Flegel’s voice rising into raucous screams. It grips you so thoroughly that the chorus mellowing out feels not like an anticlimax, but rather a weary reflection of everything before. And then the riff explodes again. Meanwhile, "Silhouettes" is the record’s one unapologetic ripper. So much of Viet Cong works in forlorn, mid-tempo anguish that hearing the first notes to “Silhouettes” in context is akin to a jump scare, rushing out the gate and never slowing down. With its disco beat and plunking piano, it’s the purest thrill on the album, as harrowing as the fragility of mortality can be.

Viet Cong received mainly positive reviews from music critics indicating that the album maintains the same shadowy, droning tones that haunted Cassette, only taking them deeper into the abyss

 

Viet Cong Track List 

 

1. Newspaper Spoons

2. Pointless Experience

3. March Of Progress

4. Bunker Buster

5. Continental Shelf

6. Silhouettes

7. Death.  

Rocktrospectiva: The Honest And Personal "Vulnicura" Turns 10

Released on 20 January 2015, "Vulnicura" was the 8th studio album by Icelandic singer and musician Björk, the album expresses her feelings before and after her breakup with American contemporary artist Matthew Barney and the healing process. No singles were released to promote the album but a series of innovative music videos were created, culminating in the 360-degree virtual reality exhibit Björk Digital. Vulnicura received widespread acclaim from critics, with many considering it one of her most honest and personal albums as well as her best output in a decade.

Björk's ninth proper full-length, filled with lush arrangements and some of her most powerful singing, can be slotted among the most human, emotionally candid, even functional of art forms: the breakup album. Björk has logged nearly 30 years of increasing artistic cred and platform-omnivorous ambition, and she has the enviable ability to anticipate sonic and technological waves just before they crest. 

 

Co-produced by Arca and the Haxan Cloak and drawing on Björk’s split with artist Matthew Barney, the album places itself among the most human, emotionally candid, even functional of art forms: the breakup album. Its position is deliberate, a "traditional singer/songwriter thing," suggesting something plainspoken, modest, even folksy. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Vulnicura is none of these things, but it’s simultaneously her most mature feat of arranging and almost psychosomatically affecting. It’s also, as was widely reported, with us a few months early. 

Vulnicura is loosely arranged around the chronology of a relationship: the period before the breakup, the dazed moments after, the slow recovery. It’s a sense of time that’s both hyper-specific—in the liner notes, Björk places each song up until the two-thirds mark in an exact point on the timeline, from nine months before to 11 months after—and loose, with half-moments that span entire dramatic arcs. "History of Touches", for example, is a near-forensic exhumation of the precise time of relationship death. The song begins and ends upon the narrator waking her soon-to-be-ex-lover, and Arca’s programming develops in slow motion as Björk’s vocal and lyric circle back upon the scale and warp the timeline: "The history of touches, every single archive compressed into a second." There’s some "Cocoon" in there, in the post-coital setting and smitten sigh, but there’s also the unmistakable sense that everything Björk describes is expiring as she speaks it. It’s luxuriant and bleary and sad, something like sleepwalking infatuated through an autopsy. 

Skip to several months after in the record's progression, album centerpiece "Black Lake", a masterwork of balancing elements: Björk’s requiem strings leading to Arca’s tectonic-plate percussion and vocal patches, cuttingly crafted (in unmistakably Björk fashion) lines like "I am bored of your apocalyptic obsessions" giving way to lines far more unadorned and unanswerable: "Did I love you too much?", Björk’s vocal delivery; she’s at least twice expressed her admiration, at the pure musical level, of fado singer Amália Rodrigues, and you can hear it in how she leans into syllables, indulging feelings then dissecting them. Rarely does Vulnicura sound anything but seamless; her palette blends in drum-and-bass loops, flatline effects, groaning cellos, pitch-warped echoes by Antony Hegarty. The more Björk has grown as an arranger, the less dated her albums sound; closer "Quicksand" initially scans like it’s approaching over-timely Rudimental territory, but it’s a little late in the album for that, and this is soon subsumed into a string reverie that’s unmistakably hers.

The album most resembles Vespertine, another unyieldingly cerebral work about vulnerability and being turned by love to besotted viscera, and also an unmistakably female album. Vulnicura doubles down on these elements, from the choir arrangements to the yonic wound imagery of the cover, like Björk’s attempt at a grand unified photoshoot of female pain, to Vulnicura’s echoes from the first track  of the long tradition of women artists thinking and rethinking their own life stories, in public, until they coalesce into art. Fittingly, when Björk dispenses with the breakup framework (and timestamps) two-thirds of the way through the album, Vulnicura becomes about more. "Mouth Mantra" is part glitchy nightmare of grotesque imagery ("my mouth was sewn up… I was not heard") and part reassertion of her artistic identity: "this tunnel has enabled thousands of sounds."

The album  was met with widespread critical acclaim. Many critics have referred to it as her best work in the last decade and the boldest move after 2011's Biophilia. It has also been compared stylistically to her critically acclaimed albums Homogenic and Vespertine. Praise has centered around the "emotional honesty and musical daring" used to portray the album's deeply personal themes. The lyrics have been described as some of her "strongest and most moving",  and Björk's voice "miraculously expressive".

 

Vulnicura Track List:  

1. Stonemilker

2. Lionsong

3. History Of Touches

4. Black Lake

5. Family

6. Notget

7. Atom Dance

8. Mouth Mantra

9. Quicksand

New Music: More Than Life

          

The Horrors are releasing a new album, Night Life, on March 21 via Fiction. Now they have released its fourth single, “More Than Life." The band say about the new single in a press release: "More Than Life" has a different type of intensity to our recent singles, it's more driving and direct. It was written in the middle of Canary Wharf, which looks more like Blade Runner everyday. It's such a strange place to do anything creative as the surroundings feel particularly stark. The song is basically about the question of what matters to you and by that point we were definitely clear on where we were heading. The video was shot by Paris Seawell.

New Music: Trouble

          

Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory are sharing their latest single "Trouble" is about the idea of having to coexist with people you love who have opposing views, and not being able to share deep parts of yourself and your narrative based on someone else's beliefs. Van Etten explains: "It’s about when there's that big part of you that someone who loves you can't know because it's not something they want to hear or are willing to learn about or understand, and those painful realizations when you choose to love and respect someone else’s needs over your own to salvage a relationship.the track has a truly transcendent tune; the bassline is stunning throughout, and simmering synths and Van Etten’s exquisite vocals take the song to another level. Watch the Susu Laroche-directed music video live from The Church Studios in London.

New Music: An Artist Is An Artist

          

British rock band Skunk Anansie, have released their brand new single "An Artist Is An Artist". Their first new music in almost three years, it finds the acclaimed four-piece at the peak of their powers and is a witty, provocative, pulsating slice of spiky, new-wave brilliance.

New Music: All I Ever Am

          

 

The newest track by The Cure "All I Ever Am" one of the best songs included in the band's latest recording, now this song sounds like it was done by the band in their golden years. Maybe the most emotional song on the entire album, so so good, hope you guys enjoyed it.

New Music: Felt Better Alive

          

Peter Doherty shares the video for "Felt Better Alive" the title track taken from the upcoming album released through Strap Originals on Friday 16th May., his first solo LP in nine years which according to Peter: It’s quite bouncy, quite country. "Dredging the mouth of the Humber" is a line from Hancock (about coagulated sprinkled sugar in the bottom of a bowl of cornflakes). The chorus I love, "And I'd always planned/ To sing in a sweet and soulful way as only cowboys can/ But my saddle strap snapped like a dog-chewed tourniquet…" It's an accurate description of how I feel about certain times in my life, y'know? Treasures of the Sierra Mardre: you set off on this mission for the gold and you just ended up lost in the mountains, being hunted by bandits. The video was shot in Normandy by French director Rose Bosch.