Former Sonic Youth frontman Thurston Moore’s new album The Best Day begins with eight downward arpeggios, which is pretty funny given his reputation as an obsessive guitar technician.
Music
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Fragments of a Shape
If Shabazz Palaces are the future of rap, as their label claims, then rap is bound for obscurantist whimsy — inventive and engaging though their records are, these proud bohemians have reached such a rarefied level of willful avant-garde perversity that it can take forever to hear how their musical elements fit together.
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Taylor Swift, Picture-Perfect
Taylor Swift has become a megaplatinum superstar largely through the construction of an artificial but rather appealing character. To call her the girl next door would downplay the dizzy self-involvement and feisty autonomy that made her a star in the first place.
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From Melbourne with Love
Founded by conductor/saxophone whiz Andy Williamson, the Bombay Royale are eleven Australian troublemakers who play their own hammy, modernized style of Bollywood movie music.
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Bland in an Interesting Way
If the War on Drugs’s Lost in the Dream is a brilliant soft-pop masterpiece, a theory I am perfectly willing to entertain, it is brilliant in a way more suited to a platinum bestseller than to a critics’ record.
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Magnum Opus Cycnorum
Swans, led by one Michael Gira, are the only band around right now to combine the abrasive militancy of classic American noise rock with mind-boggling avant-garde imagination.
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Keep Brooklyn Weird
Parquet Courts have been compared to Wire, Television, the Velvet Underground, the Modern Lovers, Sonic Youth, the Feelies, the Fall, Minor Threat, Flipper, Guided by Voices, Archers of Loaf, Silkworm, of course Pavement, and I could go on.
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Fagen’s Critical Catalogue (August 2014, Part 2)
As for iSweat Fitness Music, ah, blame it if you will on my own schlocky taste.
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Fagen’s Critical Catalogue (August 2014, Part 1)
It has come to my attention that the radio edit of Future’s “Move That Dope” has been christened “Move That Doh” in a classic censorship joke.
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Fagen’s Critical Catalogue (July 2014, Part 2)
In part 2 of this month, reviews of Lana Del Rey, Sam Smith, Indian Ocean, and Kitten.
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Fagen’s Critical Catalogue (July 2014, Part 1)
In part 1 of this month, reviews of Celtic Woman, The Fault in Our Stars, The Rough Guide to Indian Classical Music, and Deadmau5.
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Fagen’s Critical Catalogue (June 2014, Part 2)
In part 2 of this month, reviews of First Aid Kit, EMA, How to Dress Well, and Jack White.
