MUSIC
First Aid Kit: The Lion's Roar
Christina Lee
01.23.12
First Aid Kit's sophomore LP, The Lion's Roar, is music for what ails you. Hailing from Stockholm, sisters Johanna and Klara Soderberg deliver some of the most compelling Americana this side of––well, shit––Wichita.
Los Campesinos! Hello Sadness
Christina Lee
11.14.11
Faux-Welsh rockers Los Campesinos! release their third album, Hello Sadness, and Christina Lee gives her read of a geography peppered with the gouges and striations and lacunae of their maturing consciousness. And if you want to read more, try their quarterly fanzine(!) Heat Rash.
Dinosaur Jr.'s You're Living All Over Me from Continuum's 33 1/3 Series
Nick Attfield
06.13.11
In this excerpt from the latest in Continuum's 33 1/3 series, Nick Attfield reaches for the truth of Dinosaur Jr.'s 1987 album You're Living All Over Me only to learn how lyrical ambiguity can put a live rabbit in a man's mouth. Attfield is usually found at Oxford specializing in the cultural and political contexts of 19th and 20th century German and Austrian music. You can also read the opening chapter of Attfield's book on the 33 1/3 blog.
As We Here: Destroyer, Kaputt (double-LP vinyl issue)
Jeff T. Johnson
03.04.11
Jeff T. Johnson reviews the double LP release of Destroyer's Kaputt. More than a recount of Dan Bejar's usual brilliance & heavy thoughts on a record of smoother than usual vibes - with this special edition, we look inside the songster's ellipses: "If most lyric sheets disappoint because they banalize the vocals, Kaputt’s sheet is a fair representation—or recollection—of what goes on on the album," Johnson riffs alongside/through Bejar.
Everyday Magic: On Julianna Barwick and The Magic Place
Brian Howe
02.11.11
At a club in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Brian Howe chats over burritos with Julianna Barwick, a singer with a voice of angelic proportions, who can do it all it seems harmonically with one throat, one diaphragm and a loopstation (no band, at least no plans for one yet she says). Having already titillated critics with a pair of albums, her latest, The Magic Place, out February 22 on Sufjan Stevens' Asthmatic Kitty label, is also reviewed here to high marks.